The Inner Life of a Rational Agent: In Defence of Philosophical Behaviourism 9780748626731

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The Inner Life of a Rational Agent

THE INNER LIFE OF A RATIONAL AGENT

IN DEFENCE OF PHILOSOPHICAL BEHAVIOURISM

2 Rowland Stout

Edinburgh University Press

© Rowland Stout, 2006 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 11/13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-10 0 7486 2343 4 (hardback) ISBN-13 978 0 7486 2343 3 The right of Rowland Stout to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Acknowledgements Part I

viii

Context

1

Introduction I Behaviourism II Zombies III Super-spartans IV Reductive and Non-reductive Behaviourism V Outline of the Book

3 3 6 9 12 14

2

Behaviourism I Psychological Behaviourism II The Philosophical Roots of Behaviourism: Positivism or Pragmatism III Anti-realism about the Mind IV Criterial versus Dispositional Behaviourism

21 21

Functionalism I The Rise of Cognitivism and Functionalism II Theories of Behaviour III Normative Functionalism IV An Argument against Normative Functionalism V Theory Theory and Simulation Theory VI Conclusion

37 37 42 45 48 52 54

3

Part II 4

25 29 33

What is a Disposition to Behave in a Certain Way?

Dispositions to Behave I The Argument from Causation II Ryle’s Dispositions III Dispositions and Causal Explanation

61 61 65 69

Contents

vi

IV Mental States as Input Causes or Framework Causes? 5

6

Ways of Behaving I Introduction II Internalist and Externalist Models of Teleological Explanation III Why aren’t all Dispositions Trivially Teleological? IV The Need for Norms V Norm-governed Behaviour VI Conclusion Rationality and Interpretation I The Structure of Practical Rationality II Psychological or Non-psychological Conceptions of Practical Rationality III The Holism of the Mental IV The Dynamics of Interpretation

Part III

73 78 78 79 85 87 90 96 99 99 106 109 114

The Theory Applied

7

Beliefs I Introduction II Cambridge Behaviourists III Belief as a State IV Belief and Judgement V Individuation of Beliefs

121 121 122 128 133 137

8

Intentions I Intentions as States of Mind that Cause Behaviour II Intention and Belief III Intention and Commitment

145 145 154 157

Knowledge I Sensitivity to Facts II Knowledge and Belief III The Objects of Knowledge IV Sensitivity to Evidence V What is it for Something to be Evident?

161 161 165 168 175 180

Consciousness I Types of Consciousness

187 187

9

10

Contents II III IV V

Consciousness and Knowledge Self-knowledge Qualia State of Play

Bibliography Index

vii

193 199 206 211 213 219

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press for all her help. The following people have read and commented on parts of earlier drafts, and I am very grateful to them and also to the anonymous readers for their comments: Peter Hacker, Jim Lennox, Bill Lyons, Jim O’Shea, Tim Williamson and Thomas Uebel. I have presented much of the material of this book in various forms in various places and cannot remember all the people who have made useful suggestions. But I can remember benefiting from discussions with the audience of my Oxford postgraduate lecture series on New Behaviourism, and with Bob Brandom, Bill Brewer, David Charles, Bill Child, Tim Crane, Dorothy Edgington, Jennifer Hornsby, Bill Pollard, Howard Rachlin, Paul Snowdon, Helen Steward and David Wiggins. I am also grateful to the AHRB and the University of Manchester for funding two semesters of research leave, during which the bulk of the book was written. I dedicate the book to my daughter Lara with thanks for providing so many examples.

1

Introduction

I Behaviourism In this book I want to present a new theory of the mind, but a theory that has something in common with an old and discredited theory – the theory of behaviourism. I want to defend the following behaviourist claim: What it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way.

When we describe and study somebody’s mind what we are describing and studying is the way that person is disposed to behave. A person’s mind does not exist behind the way that person is disposed to behave; it is the way he or she is disposed to behave. The great philosophical proponent of this sort of behaviourism was Gilbert Ryle (1949). Ryle argued that behaviourist psychologists had been right to reject the idea that minds existed hidden behind the way people behaved, inhabiting a special inaccessible realm of consciousness. Novelists, dramatists and biographers had always been satisfied to exhibit people’s motives, thoughts, perturbations and habits by describing their doings, sayings, and imaginings, their grimaces, gestures and tones of voice. Concentrating on what Jane Austen concentrated on, psychologists began to find that these were, after all, the stuff and not the mere trappings of their subjects. (Ryle 1949: 328)

Now, as I will argue in Chapter 2, Ryle is being charitable to the behaviourist psychologists in saying that they were concentrating on what Jane Austen was concentrating on. Certainly imaginings are not the stuff of behavioural psychology.1 But, despite the hyperbole of this quotation from Ryle, I want to endorse the central thought that we describe people’s minds by describing how they behave (and are disposed to behave).

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The Inner Life of a Rational Agent

It is often supposed that behaviourism is committed to a denial of consciousness, free will, individuality, and so on. But in defending the claim that what it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way I do not want to belittle the mind, let alone eliminate it. I will argue that behaviourism, if properly formulated, allows us to say truly all the things we feel we must say about the mind. Anti-behaviourists argue that there is something else in addition to a disposition to behave in a certain way – something that lies behind that disposition – and that is the state of mind. When they see behaviourists deny this, they interpret behaviourists as denying the existence of states of mind. But the behaviourist claim is not that states of mind do not exist; it is that states of mind, rather than being behind the dispositions, are the dispositions. The idea of being disposed to behave in a certain way is not a trivial one. It is not the same as the idea of producing certain mechanical bits of behaviour. Properly understood, the idea of being disposed to behave in a certain way is exactly as rich and interesting as the idea of being in a certain state of mind. That is really the key point. If we think of a behavioural disposition as a disposition to produce certain scientifically specifiable bits of behaviour in certain scientifically specifiable circumstances, then a behavioural disposition falls very far short of being a state of mind. But in Chapter 5 I will defend a much richer notion of a behavioural disposition – one that cannot be specified except by appealing to the notion of rationality. I will talk of the disposition to do what you should do given a certain version of rationality. It is not possible to spell this out without using normative, intentional and perhaps even mental terms. So when we describe a state of mind as a disposition to behave we are not moving from the language of the mind to some other more scientific language. This insistence on the role of rationality in characterising behavioural dispositions forces a clear separation of animal psychology from human psychology, something the early behaviourists were unwilling to allow. With this in view many philosophers would not want to describe my account as behaviourist at all. While I want to stress how far my approach is from the anti-mentalist extremes of early behaviourists, I think it is still appropriate to use the term ‘behaviourism’ for reasons outlined in Chapter 2. So I develop the behaviourist claim that I started with in the following way: What it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a certain version of practical rationality.

Introduction

5

While there will be many aspects of Ryle’s approach that I will dispute in this book, Ryle is certainly the starting point for much of the discussion of behaviourism. But, describing Ryle as a behaviourist is to stick on him a label that he himself rejected. It is to ignore his scorn for ‘isms’ generally, which he took to be signs of philosophical frailty.2 And it is to ignore his conception of the job of philosophy as that of revealing how certain intellectual moves lead to nonsense rather than as that of providing anything as scientific as an account of anything. But Ryle’s main problem with the term ‘behaviourism’ was the risk of guilt by association with earlier avowed behaviourists, who worked with a ‘mechanical’ conception of behaviour, and therefore ended up at best with a mechanical conception of the mind. Ryle thought that these earlier behaviourists had made a mistake about the status of our talk about minds which committed them to one or other of the two ‘bogies’, materialism and dualism. The mistake was to think that our talk of motives, thoughts, and so on delineates a special realm – namely the mental – and that there is a special nonmental realm – namely the physical world – that can be fully described not using mental language. On this view, human behaviour, which belongs to the physical world, must be describable using completely physical language. This is what I described as a mechanical conception of behaviour. The thought that there is a physical world – a world including human behaviour – completely specifiable using physical language leaves only three possibilities for the role of mental language. One is that mental language describes another world than the physical world. This is a form of dualism. The second is that it describes the physical world. Given the original thought that the physical world can be fully described using non-mental language, this means that mental language description can be reduced to non-mental language descriptions. This is reductive materialism. The third is that mental language describes nothing at all. This possibility either commits one to eliminative materialism or to the thought that mental language serves some purpose other than description.3 Ryle’s denial that our talk of motives, thought and so on commits us to the existence of a hidden Cartesian realm of the mental need not be taken to be an endorsement of either materialism or anti-realism. These two positions – that such talk describes a world that can be described without such vocabulary or that such talk describes nothing at all – do not exhaust the possibilities for someone who rejects the dualist position. This is because Ryle may be taken to favour a third

The Inner Life of a Rational Agent

6

position, namely that such talk is talk of the ordinary material world and is an ineliminable part of our talk of the material world. Room can be made for this third alternative to dualism by rejecting the claim that there is some special realm – the physical world – fully described by non-mental language. Mental language describes the same world as non-mental language, the ordinary world of people’s doings, sayings, imaginings and so on. Not only that, but it serves a descriptive function that we have no reason to suppose can be served without such language.4 To talk of a person’s mind is not to talk of a repository which is permitted to house objects that something called ‘the physical world’ is not permitted to house; it is to talk of the person’s abilities, liabilities and inclinations to do and undergo certain sorts of things, and of the doing and undergoing of these things in the ordinary world. (Ryle 1949: 199)

It has been surprisingly hard for critics to accept that there is a genuine realist alternative here to materialism and dualism. This is a testament to the persuasiveness of the thought that there is a natural world that may be completely described in the language of physics. So from the very beginning Ryle’s behaviourism was identified with a species of materialism. Hampshire (1950: 238) advertised Ryle’s message as ‘Not Two-Worlds but One World; not a Ghost, but a Body.’ If you start off with two worlds and eliminate one of them – the ghostly one – you end up with one world, the world of the body. But Ryle was trying to stop us from thinking of two worlds in the first place. If you start off with one world, it is the world of the person – not just her body.

II Zombies Some anti-behaviourist philosophers have argued that even if actual philosophical behaviourists like Ryle have not acknowledged their commitment to denying the reality of free will, consciousness and so on, their position nevertheless commits them to that denial. This is because we can imagine a creature that behaves (and is disposed to behave) in exactly the same way that we do, but has no conscious mind. It is argued that behaviourists, by only considering how we are disposed to behave, put us on a par with such a creature, and so must in all consistency deny the reality of our conscious minds. The technical term for such a creature is a zombie. Zombies are traditionally understood to be corpses revitalised by witchcraft. Although

Introduction

7

they are not conscious they move about as though they were. This is the crucial feature of zombies that philosophers pick up on. The witchcraft, the dead eyes, and the jerky movements are all features of folk zombies that are not found in philosophers’ zombies. A philosophers’ zombie behaves exactly like we do, with an alert face, smooth movements and socially respectable behaviour. The only respect in which philosophers’ zombies are different from us is that they have no conscious minds.5 This anti-behaviourist argument from the possibility of zombies is a good example of the familiar logical fallacy of begging the question. In this fallacy you implicitly assume the thing you are arguing for as a premise in your argument, and so argue in a circle. The behaviourists claim that having a conscious mind is a matter of being disposed to behave in a certain way. So the behaviourists deny that it is possible to be disposed to behave in exactly the same way as someone with a conscious mind and yet not have a conscious mind. The anti-behaviourist argument that assumes the logical possibility of zombies illegitimately assumes the falsity of behaviourism at the very beginning of the argument. But an anti-behaviourist may think that there is independent plausibility in the idea that zombies are logically possible. They may say that we can tell consistent, worked-out stories in which zombies figure. These stories, they say, can be developed to any level of detail and no contradiction will emerge. So let us consider these stories a bit. One of them is the sciencefiction story of androids – robots made out of flesh-like material that are programmed to function just like humans. But most people who like to think about androids think of them as having conscious minds. An android might, as in the film Blade Runner, be unaware that he/she/it is an android and be horrified to discover it. These are not the states and responses of something without a conscious mind. It is very difficult to think of an effective android where all is ‘silent and dark within’.6 When you talk to them, play with them, make them laugh, or fall in love with them, you cannot help but see them as conscious beings. Perhaps a better scenario for the anti-behaviourist is that told in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Here we have a story where people are killed by aliens who then take over exact replicas of their bodies.7 The aliens put up a very good pretence of being those people, behaving in almost all ways just like them. As it happens, the aliens are not very good at faking emotional responses, but this just confuses

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The Inner Life of a Rational Agent

the story for our purposes. We can suppose that they are such good actors that they cannot be found out unless they want to be. But the whole point about these zombies is that they are pretending. Pretending is the exercise of a conscious faculty of the mind. Body snatchers may lack normal human emotions, and in this respect be like human psychopaths. But they have conscious goals and they are conscious of their environment. And, although they lack normal human emotions, they do not lack emotions of every sort. After all they are desperately keen to take over the world. And, of course, they are not disposed to behave in exactly the way we are. They only behave like us in our company when they are putting on the pretence. But the pretence is embedded in a way of life that is not at all like ours, involving as it does dedication to the goals of nurturing their pods, killing humans and taking over their environment. A pretence is only a pretence if it is embedded in a non-pretending way of behaving that gives the pretence its point. When you are pretending you are still doing one thing genuinely – namely the pretending. You are not merely pretending to pretend. For the zombie story to work properly the pretence must be total, and this is a contradiction in terms. A total pretence would not be a pretence at all, but a way of life in its own right.8 David Chalmers, in his book The Conscious Mind, writes that the logical possibility of zombies is obvious to him. ‘A zombie is just something physically identical to me, but which has no conscious experience – all is dark inside’ (1996: 96). We must not forget that this zombie would have just written a 414-page book on consciousness. It couldn’t have been easy doing that, all being dark inside. To be fair to Chalmers, his zombies are supposed to be conscious in one sense. They are aware of their environment. Chalmers calls this ‘psychological consciousness’. What makes them zombies for Chalmers is that there is nothing it is like to be them. They do not have what Chalmers in common with Block (1995) and others calls ‘phenomenal consciousness’. There are various ways appealed to by Chalmers of characterising phenomenal consciousness. It is the subjective quality of experience. It is the internal aspect of mental life. It is what it feels like to be a cognitive agent. It is that part of our mental life that is not going on in the dark, but is lit up inside.9 A zombie in Chalmers’ sense has psychological consciousness but no phenomenal consciousness. This is a very difficult idea to get one’s head around. Chalmers’ zombie is aware of everything that we are

Introduction

9

aware of, but all is darkness inside. They have dark awareness. While the possibility of such a thing may seem obvious to Chalmers it seems very far from obvious to me. Each of Chalmers’ ways of characterising phenomenal consciousness is conceptually quite complex and unpacking them all is a real philosophical task. It is not good enough simply to appeal to intuition to say it is obvious that zombies are possible when it is far from clear that one understands what zombies are supposed to be.

III Super-spartans The opposite of a zombie is a creature that does have a properly rich mental life but does not manifest this in its behaviour. Behaviourism is committed to saying that people who do not respond behaviourally to pain for example do not feel pain. But if creatures that were able to feel pain but never expressing it could exist, they would appear to constitute a counterexample to behaviourism. The argument is illustrated by Hilary Putnam in his paper ‘Brains and Behaviour’ (1975: Chapter 16) with the science-fiction example of the super-spartans, who have a profound pride about suffering pain uncomplainingly. They do not squirm or scream or even move away from the pain source except in a deliberate attempt to avoid their body suffering damage. In the end they drop any talk of pain from their language. According to Putnam, the super-spartans still feel pain even though there is no associated behavioural disposition. But behaviourism only requires that to be in a state of mind – for example, feeling pain – is to be disposed to behave in certain ways. You may be disposed to behave in certain ways even when you do not behave in these ways in the actual circumstances. For example, I may keep my feelings to myself, but would express them in the right circumstances. If it were completely all right to express my feelings I would be screaming and writhing, but as it is I am still and silent. I am disposed to behave in certain ways even though I do not produce any of the bits of behaviour that go with these ways of behaving. The point about the super-spartans is that they have a reason to repress their pain behaviour. If that reason were reversed, then presumably they would express their feelings of pain. That is all that is required for the behaviourist. Perhaps we do not have to go to science fiction to find examples of pain without any associated behavioural dispositions. There is a troubling possibility when you have an operation involving general

10

The Inner Life of a Rational Agent

‘anaesthetic’ that you are awake and in agony during the operation, but paralysed and so unable to warn the anaesthetist or surgeon. Anaesthetists, for entirely good reasons, usually try to give patients the lowest dose of anaesthetic they can get away with. In some operations it may be that insufficient anaesthetic is given, but because the drugs that are given by the anaesthetist paralyse the patient, the medical staff are unaware that the patient is in pain. For the patient this would result in anything from the ability to remember aspects of the operation under hypnosis to recovering from the paralysis screaming that they were wide awake all the time they were being operated on. This sort of report might be regarded as providing good evidence that the patient was conscious during the operation, although the possibility of a vivid nightmare during the operation should not be ruled out especially given the anxiety that anyone would feel about it. But the anaesthetist’s drugs may also have another effect; they may result in the patient losing his or her memory of the event. If the amnesic effects of the anaesthetist’s drugs are good enough there should be no reports of pain, and there may not even be the so-called ‘implicit memory’ that hypnosis would uncover. There may be no post-operative stress at all. But does that mean the patient was not really in pain or shock? If that patient had not been paralysed but had only had the amnesic effects of his or her drugs, we would say that he or she had been in pain but forgotten about it. We would be forced to say this by the evidence of that patient’s screams during the operation. Paralysis by itself does not eliminate pain, just some of the symptoms of pain. Amnesia by itself does not eliminate pain, just some other symptoms. Both together may eliminate all the symptoms, but, since the pain itself is untouched by either component, why should it be eliminated by them both together? Would you undergo an operation knowing that the anaesthetist was only using a very effective paralysing agent combined with a very effective amnesic agent? The behaviourist may respond by saying that in such a situation you are still in pain because you are disposed to behave in a characteristically pained way if you are physically capable of doing so. The paralysed patient’s pain may be characterised by the fact that were that person able to move he or she would scream. Perhaps we might say that, as in the case of the super-spartans, there is still a disposition to behave in a pained way, even though the realisation of that disposition is being blocked.

Introduction

11

The real problem for behaviourism would arise if it were possible to be in a state of pain and yet to have no disposition at all to behave in a characteristically pained way.10 This is how Putnam develops his story of the super-spartans. No matter what the circumstances, these super-super spartans would not express their pain behaviourally. But at this point in the story I think the behaviourist should cast some doubt on the reality of the pain. Think of how we describe pain. For example I might say that my pain is unbearably bad. This means that I cannot bear it stoically. Not being able to bear a pain is a fact about how I am disposed to behave. So it makes no sense to say of super-super-spartans who have no disposition at all to behave in a pained way that their pain is unbearable. Extending this argument, we can say that it makes no sense to say that they have a pain as such at all, since pain just is that state which in extreme forms is unbearable. Galen Strawson (1994) develops the Putnam-style example to consider creatures who have sensations, emotions, beliefs, and desires at the same time as being ‘constitutionally incapable of any sort of behaviour, as this is ordinarily understood’ (1994: 151). He calls them Weather Watchers since their abiding interest in life is the weather. Once in their youth they moved about, and the behaviourist would have no problem in attributing to young Weather Watchers a mental life. But as they get older they become more rooted (literally) and passive, until they stop altogether. Since we can imagine ourselves sitting quite still, passively watching the weather and having feelings, emotions and beliefs about it, why can’t we imagine the Weather Watchers, who have fallen into this passive state as their only possible way of life? I suppose that this book is an attempt to answer that rhetorical question. Strawson accepts that his anti-behaviourist examples are question-begging, but that they serve to articulate the discussion. The behaviourist is given a challenge by such stories. The challenge is to show that a proper understanding of what it is to feel pain and emotions, to have beliefs and intentions, and to see, hear and feel things involves realising that these are all aspects of behavioural dispositions.11 It may not be intuitively clear at the outset whether the Weather Watchers are genuinely intelligible. The behaviourist must show that they are not intelligible by providing an intuitively compelling behaviourist account of the mind.

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The Inner Life of a Rational Agent

IV Reductive and Non-reductive Behaviourism The most radical sort of behaviourism, exemplified by the iconoclasm of the early psychological behaviourists, claims that ideally mental vocabulary should be eliminated from our language in favour of purely behavioural vocabulary. According to this approach, which is a kind of eliminativism, mental language is not properly scientific, and the right way to describe people is in terms of their behaviour instead.12 An eliminativist might claim that talk of people’s states of mind, while not strictly false, is not entirely meaningful or is so imprecise as to be useless. Or they might take an even harder line and claim that talk of people’s states of mind is strictly false. People do not have minds; they only have behavioural dispositions. According to this approach, we are all subject to a massive error when we talk about people thinking, feeling, seeing, believing, and so on. This kind of behaviourism seems absurd. It is like saying that animals are never pregnant; they are merely sometimes disposed to have babies. It requires the wholesale rejection of our tried and tested conceptual scheme concerning the mental. And most people, quite rightly, would need a very powerful argument to be persuaded of this. Although in fact very few philosophical behaviourists have ever advocated such an extreme position, it has still managed to stick and give behaviourism a bad name. Behaviourists are so often accused of denying the reality of the conscious mind that behaviourist philosophers who are perfectly realist about the mind have often rejected the label ‘behaviourism’.13 Less radical than the claim that mental vocabulary should be eliminated in favour of purely behavioural vocabulary would be the claim that mental vocabulary could be eliminated in favour of purely behavioural vocabulary. This latter claim characterises reductive behaviourism. When the behaviourist claim is understood as part of a reductive account of the meaning of mental language it commits us to something like the following: We could explain the meaning of our talk about someone’s state of mind to someone who did not understand such talk by providing translations of mental talk into behavioural talk. These translations would consist of fully specified versions of the behaviourist claim that what it is to be a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way.

By ‘fully specified versions’ I mean that we would have to specify which behavioural disposition went with which state of mind. For

Introduction

13

this reductive account to work it would have to be possible to understand what it is to be disposed to behave in a certain way without first knowing what it means to say that one is in a certain state of mind. The assumption here is that we could learn enough language to be able to make sense of talking about how people behave without ever having learnt any mental vocabulary, and then we could learn the mental vocabulary afterwards. If this were possible we could translate all statements about people’s states of mind to statements about how people are disposed to behave, with no loss of meaning. Mental vocabulary could be eliminated in favour of behavioural vocabulary. In practice it might not make sense to eliminate all mental vocabulary. It is much easier to say that someone wants an ice cream (i.e. using the mental term ‘wants’) than to spell out the huge behavioural disposition that corresponds to this. But in principle it would be possible to work entirely with nonmental vocabulary. Reductive behaviourism as I have outlined it is not yet committed to a reduction of mental language to physical language. That is because it may not be possible to specify behavioural dispositions using physical language – whatever that is. As I argue in Chapters 5 and 6, any description of a behavioural disposition must appeal to some conception of rationality that would not normally be regarded as physical. But although this sort of reductive behaviourism does not assume that behavioural dispositions can be specified using purely physical language, it does assume that behavioural dispositions can be specified using non-mental language. And I do not want to defend even that claim in this book.14 I am not sure whether it would be possible fully to specify the behavioural disposition that constitutes for example the feeling of pride in something except by saying that it is the disposition to behave in a way that is appropriate given that the thing is worthy of pride. When I say that what it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way, I am not saying that it is possible to understand what it is to be disposed to behave in that way in advance of understanding what it is to be in that state of mind. But while my own approach in this book is non-reductive, it is not entirely antireductive either, and I will try to say something non-circular about what it is to behave in ways corresponding to different types of mental state. In this respect the approach conflicts with that of Gilbert Ryle, who took his task merely to be to correct some bad ways of thinking that

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The Inner Life of a Rational Agent

people were inclined to get into when thinking about the mind, not to construct a theory of the mind. My approach counts as non-reductive since it is quite unconstrained by the idea that the explanation of what it is to be disposed to behave in certain ways must use only a limited non-mental vocabulary. But I do want to try out some theory-building. I want to work out what the behaviourist claim comes to in some detail and to try to explain what we mean by belief, intention, knowledge and conscious awareness in terms of it.

V Outline of the Book The book is divided into three parts. The first part establishes the context for the development of my philosophical theory. Readers who are impatient to cut to the chase could skip this, and move straight to Part II without losing the thread of the argument. But they would lose a sense of the motivation for the account and of how the account relates to the philosophy of mind more generally. They would also lose the point of the dialectic between behaviourism and functionalism that underlies much of Part II. In Chapter 2 I will set the scene by considering in partly historical terms the theories of philosophical and psychological behaviourism. This discussion is not a mere digression. I want to establish where a non-reductive theory like the one I will be presenting fits into the picture of behaviourism as it emerged in the twentieth century. Such a theory need not be embarrassed by being called ‘behaviourist’. In Chapter 3 I will introduce functionalism – the supposed successor to behaviourism in the philosophy of mind. Developed by Hilary Putnam, David Lewis and others in the 1960s and 1970s, functionalism was supposed to retain the best aspects of behaviourism and yet, by having a different approach to the causal role of mental states and a different holistic approach to interpretation, was supposed to be a major improvement. In Chapter 3 I argue that functionalism should work with a normative conception of a theory of behaviour. I will make the same sort of argument for behaviourism in Chapter 5. But I will argue in Chapter 3 that the way functionalism is structured means that it cannot get the relation between norms, mental states and behaviour right. The central difference between functionalism and behaviourism is that, according to functionalism, explanations of behaviour must invoke mental states, and according to behaviourism, explanations of

Introduction

15

behaviour can be had without invoking mental states, and so the attribution of mental states may follow on after. To the extent that a functionalist explanation of behaviour is normative and invokes some conception of practical rationality, that conception of practical rationality is a psychological one, itself invoking mental states. In the behaviourist theory I develop, practical rationality is not psychological; it makes recommendations for behaviour on the basis of how the world is, not on the basis of what mental states the agent has. If we can say that a creature’s behaviour is sensitive to such a non-psychological conception of practical rationality, we can thereby attribute mental states to that creature. Hand in hand with the construction of my own account in Part II will be an attack on functionalism. I will show that functionalists in fact get the causal role of mental states wrong (Chapter 4, section IV). I will show that they get practical rationality wrong (Chapter 5, sections IV and V). And I will show that they get the process of interpretation of other minds wrong (Chapter 6, sections III and IV). One issue that arises for behaviourism is the question of whether states of mind may be said to cause our behaviour. In particular, it seems that Ryle must have denied that states of mind cause our behaviour, since, according to him, they do not exist behind the way we behave but are constituted by the way we behave. But, as I show in Chapter 4, we need to be very careful in making these moves. I will argue that the way people are disposed to behave does in some sense cause their actual behaviour, and in that sense exists ‘behind’ it. But this is quite compatible with saying that a state of mind is a disposition to behave. This notion of a disposition has seemed highly questionable to many philosophers. There is something redolent of Aristotelian scholastic philosophy in talking about dispositions, powers or potentialities. And many philosophers, following the robust empiricist approach of people like David Hume, either reject such talk out of hand or turn it into something else. In Chapter 4 I will begin constructing my own account by developing a conception of causal dispositions. This conception is more Aristotelian than is common in modern philosophy of causation. But I argue that it needs to be. A crucial distinction introduced here is that between what I call a framework cause and an input cause. A framework cause is a mechanism or a system or a dispositional state. It is something with a potentiality, and the way it works must be described using conditional statements or laws. An input cause is an event or

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state whose presence or occurrence satisfies the antecedent of such a law so that the framework cause realises its potentiality and results in the effect. All this Aristotelian language will sound quite alien to many people familiar only with traditional philosophy of mind literature. But I think it is crucial for the philosophy of mind that such talk is understood properly. For an absolutely fundamental mistake is made in many approaches – in particular in that of functionalism – by assuming that mental states are input causes rather than framework causes. Without the distinction properly in place it is impossible not to make this mistake. So I argue that mental states are framework causes of behaviour. And this means that they are states grounded in the underlying nature of the person. I am happy to call them mechanisms. The way these mechanisms work must be described using laws. Determining what these laws are and how they relate to different mental states is the main task of the rest of the book. I will argue that they must be characterised by reference to practical rationality. That at least some states of mind are dispositional states is not in itself particularly controversial. It is usually accepted that to believe something is to be in a dispositional state of some sort. People who are fast asleep still have beliefs, and saying this seems to be saying something about how they would behave and what they would think were they awake and faced with some relevant situation. In this book I will extend this to states of intending, knowing and (most controversially) being conscious. In Chapter 5 I put in place the piece that distinguishes this account from simplistic versions of behaviourism. I argue that ways of behaving must be characterised normatively, and that states of mind are dispositions to behave in ways that are sensitive to practical rationality. I construct this argument from a discussion of the nature of action itself and the way that actions are explained. First of all, following Aristotle, I claim that actions are essentially teleological – that is they admit of teleological explanation. This means that in acting you are sensitive to means-end rationality. Then I argue that means-end rationality only makes sense when it is embedded in a larger conception of practical rationality which can only be articulated using normative language. This means that behavioural dispositions can only be spelt out using normative language. And this in turn means that a behaviourist theory should be non-reductive.

Introduction

17

Then I elicit the help of Kant to clarify further what it is for behaviour to be norm-governed. The idea is that agents must be sensitive to rationality as a whole, and in being sensitive to rationality as a whole, agents are governed by particular versions of rationality, versions which vary from perspective to perspective and moment to moment. At this point I have the structure of my account established. A certain mental state is a disposition to behave in a way that is governed by a certain version of practical rationality. An agent on this view embodies a mechanism that is sensitive to rationality. In Chapter 6 I explain what I mean by a version of practical rationality. I argue that practical rationality is essentially dynamic – that one and the same version of rationality will give different recommendations at different times, for different people and so on. I also claim that any version of rationality may embed an awful lot of irrationality. So my picture of agents as essentially rational beings is not the absurd picture of super-rational beings. One thing I need to show at this point is that rationality is not a psychological matter – that the reasons we are sensitive to are not merely our own mental states or facts about these states. This is an important claim in the philosophy of rationality. By criticising a psychological conception of practical rationality I am at the same time arguing against functionalism. It is also important for my purposes because if practical rationality were psychological then describing mental states as dispositions to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality would involve circularity that might prove fatal for the theory. The more general problem here is the so-called holism of the mental. This is the idea that you can never be in a position to ascribe one mental state to someone without at the same time being able to ascribe a whole set of them. In Chapter 6 I concede that behaviourism must be holistic in the sense that a disposition to behave does not correspond to a single propositional attitude but to an overall state of mind involving several propositional attitudes. But this leaves me with the challenge of how to explain how we interpret people by ascribing individual propositional attitudes to them. How do we extract individual beliefs and intentions on the basis of an overall (unstructured) state of mind which we can attribute on the basis of a behavioural disposition. I answer this challenge by developing a conception of interpretation as itself essentially dynamic – not the static application of a theory.

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In Part III I apply the general approach to the mind that I have developed to particular aspects of the mental. In Chapter 7 I consider belief and defend the following theory: A subject believes a proposition if and only if the subject is disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that works on the assumption that that proposition is true.

Belief, on this view, is a real, causally active state of a subject. What I mean by a version of practical rationality working on an assumption is easily explained in terms of the general account of practical rationality developed in Chapter 6. It is possible to go to church every week and behave as if God exists but still not believe that God exists. For the version of practical rationality that such a way of behaving is governed by does not really work on the assumption that God exists. If it did, then when faced with some situation where the right behaviour depended on whether God actually existed rather than on whether it was merely expedient to behave as if he did, it would make a different recommendation. The story for intentions is similar. In Chapter 8 I defend the following claim: A subject intends to achieve G if and only if the subject is disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that recommends that G is to be achieved.

It is interesting to see what the difference is between a subject being in such a state and the subject being disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that works on the assumption that G is to be achieved (i.e. the subject believes that G is to be achieved according to my account). I think Davidson’s approach to weakness of will fits very neatly into the account I present here. On my view, knowledge is a state of mind; it is a disposition to behave distinct from the disposition that is the corresponding belief, but at the same time necessitating the existence of such a belief. In Chapter 9 I defend the following principle concerning knowledge: A subject knows whether p if and only if the subject is disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that is sensitive to whether or not p.

This approach can be generalised to knowledge of who, why, what, how, etc. It can also be extended to knowledge of things, as follows:

Introduction

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A subject knows a thing if and only if the subject is disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that is sensitive to answers to questions about that thing.

The species of knowledge most often discussed – namely knowledge that – can be understood as knowledge of a fact, and as such falls out of the general account of knowledge of things. In being sensitive to answers to questions, ways of behaving must as a matter of practical reality be sensitive to whether those answers are evident. Knowledge involves sensitivity to evidence. And sensitivity to evidence requires various perceptual and rational capacities. So my behaviourist account of knowledge may be applied to perception, as well as memory, learning by testimony and other epistemic faculties. The general idea for perception is that perceiving something is becoming sensitive to or retaining sensitivity to something by perceptual means. I think it is an extraordinary vindication of the approach I am developing to the mind that knowledge and the various epistemic sub-categories of knowledge may be understood so well and so simply in terms of that approach. In Chapter 10 I consider consciousness, long thought to be the hardest nut for a behaviourist to crack. To begin with, I argue for an epistemic approach to consciousness in which the idea of a conscious state of mind is understood in terms of the idea of a person being conscious of something and not the other way round. Then I apply the account of knowledge to yield the following account of consciousness: S is conscious of O if and only if O’s present relationship with S provides S with a means to knowledge of O.

I do not think that this undermines the idea of consciousness or drains it of phenomenal content. Being conscious of the dusty redness and ineffable earthy smell of a tomato is to know the dusty redness and ineffable earthy smell of the tomato through their being present to one’s visual and olfactory capacities. Sensory qualities are out there, and when their presence to us enables us to know them they enter into our conscious states.

Notes 1. Note, however, that J. B. Watson in his manifesto for behaviourism in 1913 describes as ‘more complex forms of behavior’ such things as ‘imagination, judgment, reasoning and conception’ (Watson 1913: 174).

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2. (Ryle 1971: Chapter 11). 3. This latter possibility has been attributed to Ryle by Park (1994). It is supported by Ryle’s explicit claim that disposition statements do not report matters of fact. I examine further and reject the claim that the special pragmatic significance of disposition statements requires some kind of anti-realism about dispositions in Chapter 4, section II. 4. This way of avoiding dualism, materialism and anti-realism is exactly what Jennifer Hornsby recommends under the label ‘naïve naturalism’ (1997: 7–8). 5. The argument from the logical possibility of zombies comes from a position very radically distinct from behaviourism. See for example Chalmers (1996). It should be recognised that there are plenty of approaches in the philosophy of mind that reject both behaviourism and the logical possibility of zombies. 6. This phrase comes from Iris Murdoch (1970: 13). 7. In the film Terminator II, the creature who takes over people’s bodies is in fact an android, thus combining our two kinds of scenario in one. When the creature screams in frustration at being melted to death in a vat of molten steel, no one doubts that it is supposed to have a conscious mind, albeit a very alien one. 8. Ryle (1949: Chapter 8) argues in just this sort of way. 9. (Chalmers 1996: 4). 10. See also Lewis’s (1983: Chapter 9) example of mad pain. 11. I do not attempt to meet the challenge concerning pain and emotions in any detail in this book, but concentrate on beliefs, intentions, knowledge and conscious awareness. 12. This kind of eliminativism is a cousin of eliminative materialism, according to which mental language should be eliminated in favour of neurophysiological descriptions. 13. Daniel Dennett I think is an example of this sort of philosopher; see his comments in Dahlbom (1993: 210); and Gilbert Ryle was reluctant to stigmatise himself by adopting such an ‘ism’, although he thought that it was harmless to describe his approach as behaviourist (1949: 327). 14. I will not argue against it either.

2

Behaviourism

I Psychological Behaviourism Philosophical behaviourism is a view about the nature of the mind, the concept of mind and mental predicates. It may remain neutral about how the science of the mind should be pursued. Psychological behaviourism on the other hand is committed to the methodological claim that the scientific study of animal psychology should be limited to the scientific study of animal behaviour. So it has been common for philosophers to make a complete separation between the two kinds of behaviourism. This has partly been in an attempt to dissociate behaviourism from the deeply unpopular views of hard-line psychological behaviourists like B. F. Skinner. Skinner has become a kind of Dr Frankenstein in the popular imagination. This image is exemplified by his use of the Skinner Box for imprisoning pigeons and experimenting on them. Lights flash, bells ring, and the birds peck levers and get pellets of food delivered in reward. Sometimes they get electric shocks instead. By observing how the pigeons’ behaviour developed in these boxes, Skinner thought he had come to understand the basic process of all animal learning, including human learning – that of conditioning.1 Although philosophical behaviourism makes no such claim about the role of conditioning, philosophical and psychological behaviourism cannot be entirely separated. For although psychological behaviourism may ostensibly be about the science of psychology, its fundamental premise is that claims about minds (or at any rate claims that purport to be about minds) are really claims about behaviour. This is the fundamental assumption of philosophical behaviourism too. Psychological behaviourism emerged in opposition to Introspectionist Psychology, whose central proponents were Willhelm Wundt (1832–1920) and his student Edward Titchener (1867–1927). The aim of Introspectionist Psychology was to categorise the different items that passed through consciousness and to chart the association

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between these items. Using introspective investigators who were trained to react quickly and accurately to their own ideas and impressions, introspective report was turned into a scientifically controlled investigation. This may have seemed the natural way for the science of psychology to develop given the early modern conception of the mental life as the passage of items through consciousness, and especially given David Hume’s proto-psychological claims about the role of habit in governing this passage.2 But by the beginning of the twentieth century this conception must have seemed very out of date, and Introspectionist Psychology had started to lose its way in futile debates about what could and could not be introspected.3 Watson began his 1913 article, ‘Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it’, by saying: ‘Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. The theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.’ For Watson, there was no role whatsoever for introspection in psychology. Only by studying behaviour could psychology live up to its aim of being a truly objective science. Watson’s behaviourism was partly methodological. This means that he was making a claim about the right methods for doing psychology; studying behaviour was the right way to learn about psychology and introspection the wrong way. But Watson’s behaviourism went beyond this methodological claim. He argued for a shift in the very subject matter of psychology. Psychologists should not be interested in consciousness at all; they should study behaviour for its own sake. In this respect animal behaviour is just as interesting as human behaviour whether or not we are inclined to attribute consciousness to these non-human animals. Watson’s conception of behaviour was that of stimulus-response. It was a conception that chimed with the work being done in Russia by physiologists like Pavlov and Sechenov on reflex reactions and conditioned reflexes. The stimulus was a proximal environmental input or structured set of such inputs. It was taken to be proximal – occurring right at the skin of the animal – as psychology was supposed to be a study of what was going on in the animal itself not in the space around the animal. So if a dog was reacting to a bell ringing, the stimulus should be defined as a certain sound coming into the dog’s ear, rather than some event at a distance from the dog. The response was equally proximal. There was no point in describing a dog’s behaviour as,

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say, frightening an intruder since that would depend on features of the dog’s environment outside the dog. Rather the dog’s behaviour should be described in terms of the physiological response of barking for example. In this respect Watson’s behaviourism had something in common with the introspectionism he was attacking. Introspectionists were keen to eliminate what they called ‘stimulus error’ from their observations. Stimulus error occured when an introspecting investigator reported some feature of the environment when what the investigator should have reported was only his or her internal sensation of that feature. For Watson too psychology was supposed to be the study of something essentially internal to the subject: not internal in the sense of being in an interior realm of consciousness; but internal in the literal sense of being inside the skin of the subject.4 Another aspect of introspectionism that Watson’s behaviourism managed to inherit was associationism. Introspectionism studied the laws relating the passage of objects of consciousness – what was associated with what. Watson’s behaviourism studied the laws relating the passage of pieces of stimulus-response behaviour. Starting with the reflex arc, which is a piece of stimulus-response behaviour that does not depend on any others, he looked at ways that new pieces of stimulus-response behaviour could be generated through conditioning or habit. This is like Hume’s proto-psychology. The passive play of ideas and impressions was replaced by the passive play of stimulusresponse patterns. One final aspect of Watson’s behaviourism that is worth mentioning is his claim that one of the goals of psychology is the control of behaviour. By ignoring the autonomy of the agent, behaviourist psychology failed to respect people as ends in themselves, and accepted the control of others as a perfectly respectable scientific goal. In the social and political environment of the early part of the twentieth century, this may have seemed quite natural. But when Watson’s great pupil and successor as the hard man of behaviourist psychology, B. F. Skinner, talked about behavioural conditioning in the 1950s and 1960s the political reaction against behaviourism became established. It didn’t matter that Skinner’s main political message was that punishment and negative conditioning generally were much less effective forms of conditioning than positive reinforcement. The very idea that scientists should be setting themselves up as an authority on how to condition people so that they behaved better had become anathema.

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The Inner Life of a Rational Agent So, to summarise, here are the key claims of Watson’s behaviourism:

1. The proper method for gaining scientific understanding of something’s mental life (or of what is described as its ‘mental life’) is the study of its behaviour, not introspection. 2. Psychology should be the study of non-human animals as well as human animals. 3. In gaining scientific understanding of the ‘mental life’ of an animal by studying its behaviour what we gain understanding of is just its behaviour – not some inner realm of consciousness. In other words, what is described as the ‘mental life’ of an animal is simply the life of its behaviour. 4. There is no need for talk of consciousness in describing the psychology of an animal. So-called ‘mental’ predicates (including the very word ‘mental’) can be eliminated from our description of animal psychology. 5. The behaviour of an animal is to be understood in terms of proximal stimulus-response patterns. In other words, psychology should not be concerned with behaviour as a socially or environmentally constituted phenomenon. 6. That aspect of the behaviour of animals that psychology should study is the pattern of associations between stimulus-response structures. 7. The point of psychology is not just the explanation and prediction of behaviour, but also its control. Most of these aspects of Watson’s psychological behaviourism are logically independent of one another. This makes the definition of psychological behaviourism a tricky matter. As behavioural psychology developed through the twentieth century, several of these features of Watson’s behaviourism were dropped or altered. Claims 4–7 have all been rejected at one time or another by later psychologists who were still happy to call themselves behaviourists. Skinner (1953), for example, extended Watson’s stimulus-response conception of behaviour to a conception of operant behaviour. An operant is defined as a class of responses unified by some condition in the environment. So for Skinner, behaviour is described in terms of the outer environment not just the movement of muscles in response to stimuli. Tolman, influenced by Gestalt psychology, described himself as a molar behaviourist. Behaviour had to be described in terms of overall patterns, and there was no reason not to use purposive and even

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mentalistic vocabulary to describe these patterns. In the same spirit, more recent behaviourists like Staddon and Rachlin have argued for a conception of behaviour that goes far beyond Watson’s conception of a stimulus-response and Skinner’s conception of an operant.5 Rachlin describes his kind of behaviourism as teleological behaviourism in which behaviour should be described in terms of the goals to which it is directed. So the core of behavioural psychology as it has developed is captured in the first three of these claims. But modern-day cognitive psychology, which is really opposed to behaviourism, would also be quite happy with the first claim – the methodological claim that the study of behaviour should be used as the way to find out about cognitive processes.6 It would also usually accept the second claim. So it is really the third claim that distinguishes behaviourism proper. In studying patterns of behaviour you are not trying to investigate a mental world that exists behind these patterns. The patterns of behaviour are the very subject matter of psychology. This is a constitutive claim, not a merely methodological claim. It is a claim about what constitutes the mental life of animals, or at least what constitutes that part of the life of animals that might ordinarily be called ‘mental’. Whatever it is we are investigating when we study the behaviour of animals is not something else that we can infer from our behavioural observations. It is something that is constituted by the very behaviour we are observing. It is largely for this reason that we should not accept the glib separation of philosophical and psychological behaviourism. Psychological behaviourism is often described as merely methodological, while philosophical behaviourism makes the constitutive claims about what the mental really is. But psychological behaviourism is characterised by its commitment to the claim that what is described as the ‘mental’ life of an animal is really its behavioural life.

II The Philosophical Roots of Behaviourism: Positivism or Pragmatism? The reductionist approach to behaviourism that I introduced in Chapter 1, section IV, is associated (perhaps not entirely fairly) with the work of some of the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle and their associates in the 1930s – in particular Moritz Schlick, Carl Hempel and Rudolf Carnap. Carnap ([1932] 1959) in his paper ‘Psychology in Physical Language’ applied the verification principle to sentences about

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people’s states of mind to yield the following somewhat restrictive version of behaviourism.7 The sentence ‘Mr A is excited’ has the same content as a sentence that asserts the existence of that physical structure . . . of Mr A’s body (especially of his central nervous system) that is characterised by a high pulse and rate of breathing, which, on the application of certain stimuli, may even be made higher, by vehement and factually unsatisfactory answers to questions, by the occurrence of agitated movements on the application of certain stimuli, etc. (Carnap [1932] 1959: 172)

Carnap’s conception of physicalist reduction had already softened within a very few years of this 1932 paper, perhaps under the influence of his Vienna Circle colleague Otto Neurath.8 And by the time of the 1959 reprint of his paper, Carnap had switched from a reductive behaviourism to something closer to what we now think of as reductive functionalism, by claiming that mental terms may be introduced as theoretical concepts. The idea here is that we should not require a sentence-by-sentence reduction of the mental to the physical, but a reduction at the level of the whole theory. We might have a theory of Mr A’s behaviour that includes sentences like ‘Mr A is excited’. The content of the theory as a whole is determined by the set of observation sentences that may be deduced from it, even though there may be no specific set of observation sentences that may be deduced from ‘Mr A is excited’ in isolation. The reductive behaviourism of logical positivists like Schlick, Hempel and the early Carnap in the 1930s is a peculiar manifestation of philosophical behaviourism, having little in common with the sort of approach that was developing in Britain (Frank Ramsey, Richard Braithwaite and Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge and Gilbert Ryle in Oxford), or in America with the descendents of the American pragmatists. It is clear from the chronology that logical positivism was more influenced by than influencing behaviourism. The philosophical background against which psychological behaviourism actually grew up was certainly American pragmatism not logical positivism.9 Pragmatism is a school of thought that began in the second half of the nineteenth century with the American philosophers C. S. Peirce and William James, continued into the twentieth century with G. H. Mead and John Dewey, and lasted in some form right through that century with Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty and, most recently, Robert Brandom. But it is an approach that extends far beyond this line of American pragmatists, informing philosophy outside of the United

Behaviourism

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States in both the analytic and phenomenological traditions. Indeed, the philosopher who might be thought to represent the spirit of pragmatism most powerfully is Ludwig Wittgenstein. Peirce, Mead and Dewey were all very broadly behaviourists, although their approaches, like that of the later Carnap, had more in common with functionalism than the sort of behaviourism I will be defending. In America the tradition of pragmatism remained a dominant force throughout the twentieth century, influencing the functionalism of Hilary Putnam and David Lewis and the interpretationism of Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett. Broadly speaking, pragmatism stresses the importance of dynamic social practices in the understanding of meaning, epistemology and ethics. These practices are ways of thinking, talking and behaving, within which even the philosophical activity of trying to understand such practices must be embedded. The strand of pragmatism that is relevant here is the view that the meaning of words and sentences is revealed by the way the words and sentences are (or should be) used in practice.10 The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit, and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise . . . What a thing means is simply what habits it involves. Now, the identity of a habit depends on how it might lead us to act, not merely under such circumstances as are likely to arise, but under such as might possibly occur, no matter how improbable they may be . . . There is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference in practice. (Peirce [1878] 2000: 80–1)

One weakness in this conception of pragmatism, a weakness that was corrected by later pragmatists, is Peirce’s identification of a practice with a set of habits. This identification might be taken to be simplistic in one crucial respect. In thinking of a practice as a way of behaving we must think of it as a way to behave. A practice embodies a set of rules or norms which recommend doing certain things in certain situations. On the other hand, a habit just involves a causal connection between a certain kind of situation and a certain kind of behaviour developed over time through association. You make no mistake if you fail to behave in conformity with a habit, but if you fail to behave in conformity with a practice you fail to behave as you ought to do according to that practice. ‘Normativity’ is the word philosophers use nowadays to refer to that aspect of life relating to what should or should not be done, what

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is correct or incorrect, right or wrong, good or bad, and so on. It includes morality in particular, but is not limited to moral imperatives. Any aspect of the world where rightness or wrongness or success or failure applies is described as normative. A simple way to think of normativity is that it applies to those things where mistakes can be made. We are concerned with normativity when we consider the suitability of a can opener, the legality of a move in chess, the correctness of a logical inference or the inappropriateness of an action. So habits are not normative; practices are. A norm, according to this usage, is not just a standard rule or practice, but is any rule or reason whatsoever. Norms should not be taken to be defined by the way people actually behave in practice; otherwise we could make no sense of the idea of people making mistakes in practice. But at the same time they are not independent of the way people actually behave; there must be something about the way people actually behave that means that it is that particular normatively understood practice that they are engaged with. There must be something about the way people actually behave that means that they are behaving in a way that is subject to the norms of that practice rather than any other. The norms of a practice are then in the uneasy position of neither being determined by the way people actually behave in that practice nor being independent of the way people actually behave. What are the norms that define the practice that is our use of mental language? We describe our own and other people’s states of mind and respond to those descriptions in various ways, and these descriptions and responses are subject to a system of linguistic norms. For example, it is wrong to describe someone as intending to go to the cinema if the person exhibits no inclination to go to the cinema even when the opportunity is presented to him or her at no cost. It is right to describe yourself as believing that Henry VIII had six wives if you are disposed to assent to the proposition that Henry VIII had six wives. Such practices within which states of mind are attributed relate the use of mental terms to behavioural dispositions. So this kind of pragmatism supports some sort of behaviourist approach to the concept of mind. But the derivation of even this weakly behaviouristic view of the mind would not be available if the practices within which states of mind are attributed were introspective rather than behavioural. A non-behaviourist pragmatist might argue that the practice of using mental language is not the social practice in which we describe each other’s states of mind in virtue of how we behave, but the private practice of describing one’s own mind in virtue of how it seems to one.

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29

Why can’t introspection count as a practice which defines the meanings of mental terms? This is where Wittgenstein’s private language argument comes in.11 Wittgenstein describes something that looks like such an introspective practice that might fix the meaning of a term ‘S’ – namely writing ‘S’ in a calendar every time a certain recognisable sensation recurs.12 But he claims that such an introspective ceremony has no space for any sensitivity to its supposed norms. If there were something else behind what the subject took that sensation to be, the presence or absence of this might be thought to constitute a criterion of correctness for the use of the sign. But in this introspective ceremony, there is no practical role for anything behind the appearance of a sensation. ‘A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism’ (Wittgenstein 1958: section 271). Since the introspective ceremony involves no actual discrimination of anything behind what seems to the subject to be the correct use of the sign, then no such thing can provide norms for the practice. Suppose everyone had a box with something in it; we call it a ‘beetle’. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. But suppose the word ‘beetle’ had a use in these people’s language? – If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. – No, one can ‘divide through’ by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. (Wittgenstein 1958: section 293)

III Anti-realism about the Mind Philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein are often anti-realists about the mind. They take Wittgenstein to have shown that applying a mental predicate is not describing some entity at all – not even a behavioural disposition; applying a mental predicate has quite a different function or role in the rules that articulate our linguistic practices. This would mean Wittgenstein could not be a behaviourist about the mind either. Such a view finds a place within philosophical pragmatism more generally. According to pragmatism we should look at the norms governing linguistic practice in order to understand the meanings of bits of language. By observing the large variety of different roles that different

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sorts of speech acts may have in our overall linguistic practices, pragmatism opens up the possibility of utterances that look (or sound) like descriptive utterances, but which do not really describe states of things at all. Such utterances may communicate certain things about the situation the speaker is in without actually describing them. Wittgenstein (1958: sections 244–315) said that when one says that one is in pain one is not describing something behind the pain behaviour. This sounds like behaviourism. But he also said that it is wrong to say that there is nothing behind the pain behaviour or that the pain itself does not exist. The point is that in saying one is in pain, one is not describing in this sense at all, whether it be describing a sensation, a behaviour pattern or a phantom. According to Wittgenstein, the language of pain attribution does not function like the language of describing the furniture in a room. In saying that one is in pain, one is expressing one’s disposition to behave in a pained way, not describing it, as it were from outside. In other words, the utterance takes the place of the pain behaviour in the various pain-involving practices, practices like demanding sympathy or help.13 But Wittgenstein did not in fact consistently object to thinking of the ascription of pain to someone as a form of description. What he wanted to insist on is that there are many different linguistic functions corresponding to description and that describing pain should not be seen as producing a sort of word-picture of something (1958: section 291). The description does not correspond with something that can be identified independently. When you say you are in terrible pain you are not describing an object – the pain. Indeed, it is a moot point whether it really is wrong (as most people now think) to describe Wittgenstein as a behaviourist, at least in my very undemanding sense. Although Wittgenstein himself resisted the term ‘behaviourism’ (e.g. 1958: sections 307ff.), that may have been because he associated it with the logical-positivist position of Schlick, Hempel and early Carnap – a position he may himself have been sympathetic with at an earlier time. In resisting behaviourism, Wittgenstein was really resisting reductive or eliminative behaviourism. ‘And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don’t want to deny them’ (Wittgenstein 1958: section 308). It is not clear that Wittgenstein denied that pain ascriptions can be true or false. What he did seem to deny is that the claim that one is in pain is true in virtue of its correspondence with something else – the sensation behind the behavioural disposition. Instead, the claim’s

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truth just consists in its being the correct thing to say in the practice of expressing such behavioural dispositions. But attributing pain to oneself or to someone else is a linguistic move which does have some distance from the mere expression of pain. To say that one is in pain is to assert one’s right to express pain as well as to do something which takes the place of the pain behaviour. This is pretty obvious when we consider that anyone’s claim to be in pain can be contradicted in a way that his or her more direct expressions of pain cannot be. It makes no sense to say, ‘No, that’s not right,’ in reply to someone saying ‘Ow!’ though it makes perfect sense in reply to someone saying, ‘I am in pain.’ When people merely respond to their pain by a cry or wince, they are not thereby claiming an entitlement to such behaviour. Such behaviour is as appropriate whether they are in company or all alone. Its appropriateness when alone is not derivative on its appropriateness in company. Rather, it is the other way around sometimes. However, when that person is making an assertion – a special sort of linguistic move – they are thereby claiming some sort of entitlement. And once such a linguistic move is available it is also available to others to claim (or reject) such entitlement on that person’s behalf. Here is the idea spelt out. Suppose a linguistic assertion, L, has at least the same normative role that some piece of behaviour, B, has. This means that it is appropriate to do the behaviour B when it is appropriate to make the assertion L. But, being an assertion, L involves an extra piece of normative significance. Making the assertion L is to make a claim for the appropriateness of B. The appropriateness of L depends then on the possibility of L being defended in a structure of inferences. This idea has been articulated by Robert Brandom as follows: The idea exploited here, then, is that assertions are fundamentally fodder for inferences. Uttering a sentence with assertional force or significance is putting it forward as a potential reason. Asserting is giving reasons – not necessarily reasons addressed to some particular question or issue, or to a particular individual, but making claims whose availability as reasons for others is essential to their assertional force. (Brandom 1994: 168)

As long as a pragmatist approach to mental language takes this point seriously it need not take an attribution of pain for example to have a fundamentally different role in language from that of description. Peter Hacker (1972: 297ff.) has argued that much of our talk that has

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the superficial grammar of describing pain should not be taken to be descriptive at all. He asks sarcastically (1972: 298): ‘If I cry out “It hurts, it hurts” while writhing around on the ground, and someone solicitous asks “What hurts?” to which I reply “My leg”, am I describing either my leg or my mind?’ But although the normative significance of my cry is not merely that of an ordinary assertion, it is certainly at least that of an assertion. And in the assertion something is being described – namely my state (or perhaps that of my leg). In fact when you assert that someone is in pain you may be claiming more than just that the person is in a situation that entitles him or her to behave in a pain-expressing way. I think that you are also claiming that that person is inclined in some way to realise this entitlement. As I argued in Chapter 1, section III, the super-super-spartans who have no inclination at all to express what they are entitled to express by the painful situation they are in are somehow not properly sensitive to the painfulness of their situation. They do not really feel the pain. There is a difference between the assertion that one is in pain and the assertion that one is in a painful situation. The assertion that one is in pain makes a further commitment about how one is reacting to the painful situation. According to the behaviourist claim that I am defending in this book, it is a commitment to the existence of a behavioural disposition involving sensitivity to the painfulness of the situation. The existence of that behavioural disposition is clearly expressed by a cry of pain; it is asserted (as well as expressed) by the assertion that one is in pain. So, even if the way the language of pain functions emerges from the way more direct expressions of pain function, it does not follow that saying that someone is in pain is not to describe something. Saying that someone is in pain may not be to describe some mental object inside the person; but it is at least to describe the situation that person is in as one which warrants some expression of pain.14 And I think it is also to describe the state that person is in as one in which he or she is disposed to make some expression of pain if appropriate. The anti-realist position I am reacting against here denies that applying a mental predicate to someone is to describe a state of that person. I am arguing that however impressed you are with the pragmatic roots of mental attributions in speech acts that do not describe someone’s state, there is no reason to deny that mental attributions do describe psychological states.

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IV Criterial versus Dispositional Behaviourism Some philosophers have seen in Wittgenstein’s work a very different kind of behaviourism to the sort I am advocating in this book. It is often described as criterial behaviourism.15 Criterial behaviourism is different in the first instance in being nondispositional. What it claims to pick up is a conceptual link between descriptions of people’s states of mind and descriptions of their actual behaviour. The second main difference is that the conceptual connection is taken to be a much looser sort of connection. According to criterial behaviourism, descriptions of behaviour may have a conceptual but at the same time defeasible connection with descriptions of states of minds. There are many different ways that we find out about people’s states of mind. Some of these ways are inductive. We see a sign or symptom of a certain state of mind and we infer the state of mind from that. But some ways of telling what state of mind someone is in have figured in the ways we learnt our mental vocabulary. When we see someone screaming and writhing around in the dentist’s chair, we do not infer inductively that the person is in pain. We know he or she is in pain straightaway without having to apply any inductive reasoning. According to criterial behaviourism this is because such ways of telling someone’s states of mind figure in our very concepts. They are described as criteria. But although the step from the criterion being satisfied to the fact that the person is in the corresponding state of mind is immediate it is not infallible. Criteria may be defeated by other evidence. If I know that the patient and the dentist are at that very moment acting in a play I will not conclude that the patient is in pain. So behavioural criteria are supposed to provide non-inductive, but at the same time defeasible, reasons for claims about minds. Criterial behaviourism (and the attribution of it to Wittgenstein) has been challenged by John McDowell (1998: Chapter 17) among others. McDowell argues that our way of knowing that someone is in pain could not be by observing something that falls short of the fact that the person is in pain. This could not give us the sort of justification for our belief that would constitute knowledge. Since ‘criteria’ are defeasible, someone who experiences the satisfaction of ‘criteria’ for the ascription of an ‘inner’ state to another person is thereby in a position in which, for all he knows, the person may not be in that ‘inner’ state. And the question is: if that is the best one can achieve, how

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The Inner Life of a Rational Agent is there room for anything recognisable as knowledge that the person is in that ‘inner’ state? (1998: 372)

The criterial behaviourist shares with the reductive behaviourist the idea that knowledge of someone’s states of mind is based on knowledge of something non-mental. Criterial behaviourism requires that the criteria for establishing a mental proposition and that contribute to our concept of it are more basic or primitive than the mental proposition itself. But the idea that there is a basis for our knowledge of someone’s state of mind that is independent of the person’s state of mind is not compulsory or even plausible. What enables us to have knowledge that someone is in pain may be that we ‘can literally perceive, in another person’s facial expression or his behaviour, that he is in pain’ (McDowell 1998: 305). If we are not committed to a reductionist account we can assume that the behavioural evidence for describing someone’s state of mind is much richer than that assumed by the criterialists. The behaviour you see when you see someone in pain in a dentist’s chair is not just that person’s screaming and writhing but his or her screaming and writhing about in agony. The actor, however convincing, is behaving differently. The person is not writhing about in agony; he or she is merely writhing about. Dispositional behaviourism can work with such a rich conception of behaviour – a conception that leaves no logical gap between behaviour and mind. According to the sort of dispositional behaviourism that I want to endorse, the behavioural criteria that contribute to our mental concepts are dispositions to behave in certain ways rather than simply bits of behaviour. The presence of the right sort of disposition is linked indefeasibly to the presence of the corresponding sort of state of mind. And so a dispositional behaviourist has no truck with the thought that the fact that one is disposed to behave in such a way is more basic or easier to know than the fact that one has a certain state of mind. Consider an argument attributed by G. E. Moore (1955: 12) to Wittgenstein: ‘When we pity a man for having toothache, we are not pitying him for putting his hand to his cheek.’ It seems that what we pity people for is generally not the way they behave or are disposed to behave but the situation they are in that makes them disposed to behave in that sort of way. I may feel some sort of sympathy with you for being disposed to jump around in an agonised way. After all it must be very inconvenient having such a disposition. But that is not

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the same sort of thing at all as pitying you for being in agony. And the argument may be applied to other reactive attitudes than just sympathy. But the force of this argument hinges on an impoverished understanding of the certain way that someone may be disposed to behave in. For it may be possible to characterise the way that someone is disposed to behave in terms of the situation he or she is in. For example you may be disposed to behave in a way that is appropriately sensitive to the fact that your life is in ruins. This would make it quite right for me to sympathise with you. Describing you as disposed to behave in such a way is at the same time to describe the situation you are in that justifies my sympathy. The point, as before, is that the behavioural disposition must be characterised in a sufficiently rich way.

Notes 1. He even built a box for his baby daughter, which he tried to market under the brand name ‘Heir Conditioner’. In fact Skinner’s baby box was not a device to condition his heir but a device to condition his heir’s air. Not wanting to heap heavy blankets on her to keep her warm in the Minnesota winter nights, he designed and built a crib with climate control. See Bjork (1993). Skinner was no monster even though he does seem to have had a marked disposition for putting living creatures in boxes. 2. See Hume ([1738] 1975: book 1, part 3 section 8). 3. A good account of the historical context of psychological behaviourism may be found in Lyons (1986). 4. It is an important aspect of later philosophical behaviourists, like Gilbert Ryle for example, that they rejected altogether the idea that the mind is within the subject. 5. See Staddon (1993), and Rachlin (1994). 6. See Chapter 3, section I. Cognitive neuropsychology would not be so happy with this methodological claim, since it is committed to developing an understanding of the mind through an investigation of the brain in conjunction with behaviour. 7. See also Hempel ([1935] 1980) for a similar formulation. 8. See Neurath (1959) and Uebel (1992). 9. See Smith (1986) for a compelling defence of this historical claim. 10. This phrase ‘revealed by’ is deliberately weak. I do not want to force pragmatism into a reductive position. 11. Interpretation of Wittgenstein’s private language argument is such a fraught philosophical issue that I should make clear that what follows is just what I take from the argument for my purposes.

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12. (Wittgenstein 1958: 258). 13. See Wittgenstein (1958: section 244). 14. This does not mean that there must be some identifiable cause of this warrant in that person’s external situation. 15. See Lycan (1971), Hacker (1972), Baker (1974), and Wright (1982).

3

Functionalism

I The Rise of Cognitivism and Functionalism Psychological behaviourism, having swept aside the prevailing orthodoxy of introspectionism early in the twentieth century, was then itself replaced by a new paradigm in psychology – cognitivism. While accepting a broadly behaviourist denial of introspection, cognitive psychology rejected the behaviourist claim that the subject matter of psychology is just patterns of behaviour. Cognitive psychology looked for mechanisms behind these patterns and found them by positing internal representations as causally explanatory entities. These internal representations do not have to be conceived of as inhabiting a special mental realm. They are to be conceived of as being implemented in the hardware of the brain, just as data in a computer is implemented in the hardware of the computer. So, with the development of computer technology in the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of Chomskian linguistics came the thought that by applying the way we think about computers to people we can discover the hidden mechanisms that govern our behaviour.1 Still, the assumption that representations are identifiable entities within the functioning of the cognitive mechanism looks like a throwback to the theory of ideas propounded by the British empiricists, which the associationist introspectionists were trying to implement in their psychology.2 The key assumption there was that subjects represent something in their thought or speech by having an entity in their mind that represents that thing. The work of representation is passed by this assumption from the subject to an idea in a subject’s mind.

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The Inner Life of a Rational Agent Let me spell out the transitions involved here with an example: I think about Paris. ↓ I represent Paris in my thinking. ↓ I represent Paris in my mind. ↓ There is something in my mind that represents Paris.

In the first three stages it is me doing the representing. In the final stage something else is taken to be doing the representing, and clearly a jump has been made here. The transition to the positing of an internal entity would be innocuous though if the entity in question were taken to be an abstract object whose existence logically depended on the first three stages. But in cognitive psychology mental representations, far from being merely abstracted from facts about what the subject represents in thought, are actually supposed to explain these facts. The revolution in psychology that saw the rise of cognitivism in the 1960s was reflected in the philosophy of mind by the rise of functionalism. Cognitivism and functionalism both represented a return for the long-banished hidden variable. According to Watson’s behaviourism, all the terms of one’s psychological theory must refer to observable phenomena; so a properly scientific theory must not have variables that take values that cannot be scientifically observed – i.e. hidden variables. According to functionalists, hidden variables should be introduced into a psychological theory in order to increase its explanatory strength. Mental predicates can then be read off from the structure of such a theory. The logical positivists, like Carnap, stepped back quite quickly from a wholesale rejection of hidden variables. A key philosophical justification for allowing hidden variables into a broadly positivistic programme came from Quine. Quine argued that it was inappropriate to place our psychological statements (or indeed the statements of any other scientific discourse) up against observations one at a time. Instead, we place the whole theoretical structure of psychology up against observable reality. Psychology has its own internal logical structure. In response to the theory as a whole falling foul of observations, this internal structure may be adjusted, so that the theory as a whole is in tune with observations. This is sometimes described as the holism of explanation. The individual sentences of a science are not tested one at a time. The theory as a whole is tested.

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Theory causes a sharing, by sentences, of sensory supports. In an arch, an overhead block is supported immediately by other overhead blocks, and ultimately by all the base blocks collectively and none individually; and so it is with sentences, when theoretically fitted. (Quine 1960: 11)3

Given this there is no need to rule out hidden variables. The so-called hard sciences, like physics, seem to get on fine with hidden variables. For example, the spin of an electron is not directly observable, but only takes a value as a function of the theory as a whole. So why should psychology set itself tougher standards? If the theory needs certain hidden variables to give it unity and cogency, then they may be included, and their presence and role may be adjusted in the light of the success or otherwise of the theory as a whole. So holism appears to allow talk of the mind back into psychology. Such talk is taken to be embedded in the internal structure of the theory. Mental terms are theoretical terms, figuring in theoretical postulates. The term ‘baby colic’ (sometimes called ‘three-month colic’) serves as a good analogy. Let us suppose that a baby’s pattern of crying cannot be well explained by a theory that only employs observable factors. The explanation has more unity and explanatory power if we introduce the term ‘colic’, and embed it in the theoretical structure with certain laws like the following: ‘Babies suffer from baby colic in the early evening.’ ‘When babies suffer from baby colic they cry uncontrollably unless they are held.’ ‘Baby colic usually lasts for between one and three hours.’ ‘Baby colic generally goes away after the baby is about three months old with no lasting effects.’ ‘A baby crying as a result of baby colic will have a very stiff body and bring their knees up to their chest.’

Baby colic is not as far as I understand yet directly observable. Indeed, many paediatricians do not believe it exists at all. It is a theoretical postulate. And if the theory in which it is postulated does not turn out to be the best theory, then it will be rejected. But if the theory stands up to scrutiny, colic, even if not directly observable, is a real phenomenon. The term ‘baby colic’ may be defined as that phenomenon, whatever it is, that roughly has the causal role corresponding to ‘baby colic’ in the theory. Another way to put this is by using what functionalists since Lewis (1983: Chapter 6) have called the Ramsey sentence of the theory.4 This involves removing each theoretical term from the theory and

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substituting the phrase, ‘There is something, call it x, such that . . .’ In the case of the colic theory we get the Ramsey sentence, ‘There is something, call it x, such that some but not all babies suffer from x in the early evenings and if a baby suffers from x it will cry uncontrollably unless held and if a baby cries as a result of x it will bring its knees up to its chest and . . .’ The explanatory force of this sentence is as good (or bad) as that of the original theory. We can make sense of the theory as a Ramsey sentence and then stipulate that x should be called ‘baby colic’. If it turned out that a certain sort of indigestion fitted the role mapped out for colic in the theory, then colic would be identified with this sort of indigestion. Equally, if overexcitement, or hunger and so on fitted the role then colic would be identified with overexcitement, or hunger and so on. Some paediatricians even identify baby colic with maternal (or primary carer) tiredness. ‘Babies suffer from maternal tiredness in the early evening.’ ‘When babies suffer from maternal tiredness they cry uncontrollably unless they are held.’ And so on. According to functionalism, mental phenomena are like baby colic in this respect. Psychology is the theory of behaviour. In the theory we have various laws involving mental terms, such as the following: ‘When subjects who are frightened of expressing their emotions are angry with someone they will often pretend they are not angry.’ ‘When subjects are pretending that they are not angry, the tone of their voice will rise.’ ‘When subjects want an ice cream and they believe that the only way to get it is by shouting and they do not want not to shout, then they will shout.’ ‘When subjects believe they have left their keys in their office, but do not remember where, and when they also want to find their keys, they will search their office.’

Such a psychological theory will be indefinitely large. Terms like ‘angry’ or ‘believe they have left their keys in their office’ will crop up in indefinitely many combinations. According to functionalism, what it is to believe you have left your keys in your office is to be in that state, whatever it is, that fills the role mapped out by the term ‘believe they have left their keys in their office’ in the theory. If a certain sort of indigestion fills the role, then having that indigestion is just what it is to believe you have left your keys in your office. Similarly what it is to be capable of feeling pain is to have part of the theory explaining your behaviour corresponding to what we take the psychology of pain to be. What it is actually to be in pain is just

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to be in some state, whatever it is, that corresponds in your own functioning with how pain is supposed to function in psychological theory.5 If your right ear turning scarlet had the same causal relationship with sensory inputs, motor outputs and other states that pain is supposed to have, then pain for you just would be your right ear turning scarlet. Of course, it is rather more likely that some physiological state of the brain will have that role instead. Functionalism may be seen in the first instance as the combination of three elements. The first is the pragmatist claim that the meanings of terms depend on their role in practice. The second is that the practice that gives content to mental terms is the practice of explaining behaviour. The third is the holism of explanation. Bits of behaviour cannot be explained one at a time with no reference to the rest. Explanation of behaviour (as of anything else) involves constructing theories that stand or fall as wholes. Putting these three elements together we get the functionalist claim that mental terms derive their meaning from their roles in the overall theory of behaviour.6 It follows that what it is for someone to satisfy a mental predicate is for the way that person’s behaviour is explained by psychological theory to require application of this mental predicate or something that functions exactly like it in the theory. This decomposition of functionalism into these three elements is going to structure the discussion of functionalism. So it is worth repeating: 1. Meanings of mental terms depend on their role in the practices that employ those terms. 2. The practice in which mental terms are attributed is that of explaining behaviour. 3. Behaviour is explained by a structured theory not by a set of isolated claims. Therefore, the meaning of mental terms is a function of their role in the theory of behaviour. And what it is to have a certain state of mind is for that state of mind to be what psychological theory must attribute in order to explain your behaviour. The philosophers who pioneered this approach to the philosophy of mind in the late 1960s were Putnam, Armstrong and Lewis.7 Putnam claimed that all organisms capable of mental states are probabilistic automata. This means that they possess distinct states which are related to one another and to the motor outputs and sensory inputs by probabilistic transitions. These transitions may be mapped

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out by the machine table of a probabilistic Türing Machine. So the psychological theory that explains our behaviour is also the description of the functioning of a certain sort of computer. Putnam claimed that having a mind is having a set of possible states which are structurally similar (isomorphic) to the possible states of a certain sort of computer. This is a claim shared with cognitive psychology. So functionalism about the mind is commonly a presumption of cognitive psychology. However, cognitivism also asserts that the transitions that figure in the theory or the Machine Table may be characterised in terms of information processing or the manipulation of inner representations. And functionalism need not be committed to an information-processing conception of psychology. Equally, not all cognitivists have accepted the ‘black box’ conception of functionalism, arguing that mental states have a significant intrinsic nature as well as being significant in virtue of their causal relationships with each other and the outside world.8

II Theories of Behaviour If we accept functionalism, we face the question of how best to characterise the psychological theory of behaviour that gives meaning to mental predicates. In particular is it a folk psychological theory or a scientific psychological theory? Folk psychology is the theory that we use in ordinary non-scientific explanations of people’s behaviour. Examples of such explanations are: ‘Why did John storm out of the room?’ ‘Because he felt humiliated at being described as weak and useless.’ ‘Why did she go to the shop?’ ‘Because she wanted to make a milky coffee and she just remembered that there was no milk in the house.’

David Lewis describes the theory of folk psychology as a cluster of platitudes of the following form: When someone is in so-and-so combination of mental states and receives sensory stimuli of so-and-so kind, he tends with so-and-so probability to be caused thereby to go into so-and-so mental states and produce so-andso motor response. (Lewis 1972: 256)

The cluster of platitudes of this form that makes up a folk psychology will be only largely true. The science of psychology aims to refine such a theory of behaviour. To the extent that folk psychology is a merely

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explanatory theory, scientific psychology is the way to get a better one. In this way functionalists like Stephen Stich (1996: Chapter 2) have argued that folk psychology is not a true theory and so the theoretical terms introduced by that theory are empty.9 They are like ‘phlogiston’; once the theory that gave them meaning is discredited, it is clear that the terms have no reference. This move is a bit quick, since theoretical terms are very flexible. As theories change, it is usually possible to locate the same term in the new theory, with an adjustment to its functional role. Moreover, the term as it figures in the new improved theory is usually taken to have the same meaning as the term did in the superseded theory.10 This is one moral that can be drawn from Quine’s (1953) argument against analytic truths. The role a term plays in theory is never completely fixed. For example the term ‘force’ may be introduced into Newtonian Physics by means of the equation, Force
Mass  Acceleration. In relativity theory the notion of the mass of an object is exchanged for the notion of the mass of an object at a certain velocity. So the equation that now introduces the notion of force is Force
Mass at velocity v  Acceleration. If the notion of rest mass were employed instead the equivalent equation would be Force
Rest Mass  Acceleration /
(1  v2/c2). If the meaning of the term were a function of its exact role in current theory, then the term ‘force’ would have changed its meaning. In this case the old term with its meaning fixed by a superseded theory would not have referred to anything at all. But in fact the term ‘force’ as it was used before refers to exactly the same phenomenon that the term as it is now used refers to. The word has not changed its meaning with the development of the theory. The point is that its meaning is not in fact determined by the sum of the claims of the theory into which the term was first introduced. Nor is the meaning determined by some specific core set of such claims. For, whatever core set of claims we choose to fix the meaning, we can devise a scenario where those claims need to be changed in the light of modern scientific developments while the meaning of the term remains the same. Even a stipulative definition may turn out to be false. The meaning of the term ‘force’ is really determined by its role in the theory to which it belongs, where that theory is considered as an evolving structure. This role cannot be captured in a simple list of claims involving that term. Indeed, that role probably cannot be read off from the way the theory is at any particular time, but would only be properly determinate if the theory had developed fully.

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Coming back to the case of psychology, functionalism should operate with an open-ended dynamic conception of psychological theory. The mental terms whose meanings are determined by their roles in folk psychology have their meanings determined by folk psychology as an evolving structure, not as a mere list (or cluster) of claims. This means that we would need to consider the possibility that folk psychology and scientific psychology were really the same theory at different stages of development. If they were, the terms that are embedded in folk psychology could be used with the same meaning in scientific psychology. Then the fact that scientific psychology might show some of the claims of folk psychology to be false would not show that mental terms were empty, only that their meaning was not exactly what was thought. However, if the new scientific theory is radically different from the superseded folk theory then it may not be possible to trace the role of the terms across the two theories. In this case, if scientific psychology were then to replace folk psychology completely, the functionalist would be forced to admit that our mental terms were without genuine meaning. If scientific psychology develops along the lines of cognitive psychology, then it is possible to see it as a development of folk psychology. This is because cognitive psychology sets out to provide analyses of our commonsense mental concepts in terms of information processing. It would be possible to find successors for many of the terms of folk psychology in properly developed cognitive psychology. The ultimate meanings of such terms would then be provided by cognitive psychology. This means that it would be a mistake for a functionalist to be an eliminativist about the mental. The most we could say is that our mental terms do not mean quite what we took them to mean. But if in the end the successor to folk psychology is something more like neurophysiology then there may be no role for mental terms in psychology. Stich (1996: Chapter 2) has argued that all psychological theories that employ intentional terms are ultimately false. Intentional terms describe states of mind that have propositional content: for example, believing or representing that the sun will rise tomorrow; fearing that the sky will fall on our heads; and so on. A theory with such intentional terms has a logical structure that no theory without them could have. Neurophysiology for example cannot be mapped on to folk psychology in any way that preserves places for mental terms. Stich concludes from this that mental terms really are empty.

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So here we have an argument from functionalism to eliminativism: 1. (Functionalism) The meaning of mental predicates is a function of their role in the evolving psychological theory of the explanation of behaviour. 2. As a true theory of behaviour, folk psychology will eventually be exchanged for a theory that does not employ intentional terms. 3. A psychological theory that does not employ intentional terms cannot be regarded as having evolved from one that does, in a way that preserves any role for the old intentional terms. 4. Therefore mental predicates are empty. Eliminativism is a very hard doctrine to accept. If you were an eliminativist you would not be able to say: ‘I accept eliminativism about mental discourse.’ The words ‘I’, ‘accept’ and ‘discourse’ would all have to be eliminated from your discourse, leaving you with some neurophysiological sentence that there would be absolutely no point in uttering. So the argument from functionalism to eliminativism might be better thought of as a reductio ad absurdum of functionalism.

III Normative Functionalism Functionalists can avoid being reduced to absurdity by denying the second premise of this argument. They may insist that intentional psychology (whether it be folk psychology or some sort of cognitive psychology) is more robust than this premise suggests and that there is no chance that it will be replaced as a theory of behaviour by a nonintentional scientific theory. Something crucial would be lost in the switch from a folk psychological explanation of behaviour to a neurophysiological explanation. One way to do this is to assume that a theory of behaviour should be normative. As Aristotle in The Physics, Anscombe (1957), Davidson (1980) and many others working on the philosophy of action have noted, when you ask why people did what they did, the ‘why’ is a very special sort of ‘why?’ It demands an explanation that is not merely causal.11 It demands a rationalising explanation. Intentional psychological explanation makes rational sense of behaviour. It shows why the behaviour was correct or appropriate, at least according to some way of thinking about it. In the process of causally explaining the behaviour it rationalises it. A neurophysiological explanation does not rationalise behaviour and so it will never supersede intentional psychology.12

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So a functionalist might insist that the theory that gives meaning to mental terms is at least partially a normative theory – a theory that describes behaviour as correct or incorrect as well as explaining that behaviour. The theory must embody a version of practical rationality, and, as a result, recommend the very behaviour that it explains. Assuming, as functionalists do, that the theory is nevertheless a causal explanatory theory, we must assume that part of the theory is the presumption of rationality: that is, that by and large people will do what it is rational for them to do, and they will do it because it is rational.13 The sorts of laws that figure in a normative theory of behaviour might be the following: ‘When subjects want an ice cream and believe that the only way to get it is by shouting and they do not want not to shout, then they should shout and as a result they do shout.’ ‘When subjects believe they have left their keys in their office, but do not remember where, and when they also want to find their keys, they should search their office and as a result they will search their office.’

Some philosophers are more sceptical about the need to employ a conception of rationality when explaining behaviour. Hursthouse (1991) argues for what she calls arational actions – actions like poking out the eyes in the photograph of the lover who has just rejected you. But it is important to realise that the conception of rationality that is at work in normative functionalism is not to be opposed to emotion. Emotional expression is quite rational according to this conception. There is a way of behaving corresponding to this sort of rejected love and this way of behaving involves a conception of how to behave – a version of rationality. What you should do according to this particular version of rationality are acts of symbolic violence to your ex-lover.14 The point is that in understanding the way someone is behaving you have to make that person’s behaviour rationally intelligible. If you could not see the spurned lover’s behaviour as rational according to some conception of how to behave (not necessarily one you endorse yourself), then that behaviour would not be intelligible to you, at least not as the behaviour of a conscious person. Recall the decomposition of functionalism into its three elements at the end of section I. The second element was the claim that the practice in which mental predicates are applied is that of explaining behaviour. The normative functionalist will adapt this very slightly to be the claim that the practice in which mental predicates are applied

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is that of making rational sense of their behaviour, or, as it is often put, interpreting their behaviour. Donald Davidson’s conception of a psychological theory that explains behaviour is of one that rationalises the behaviour at the same time as causally explaining it.15 Psychological theory must do these two things simultaneously – making sense of someone rationally and causally. And it does this by attributing beliefs and desires as well as other attitudes in a way that is constrained by ‘the constitutive ideal of rationality’ (Davidson 1980: 223). Davidson, influenced by Quine, and very much in line with the functionalists, claims that what it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be interpretable as such by the best psychological theory (constrained by the constitutive ideal of rationality).16 ‘What a fully informed interpreter could learn about what a speaker [believes] is all there is to learn’ (Davidson 1986: 315). Daniel Dennett makes the same sort of claim even more explicitly. ‘What it is to be a true believer is to be an intentional system, a system whose behaviour is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy’ (Dennett 1987: 15). Here is how it [the intentional strategy] works: first you decide to treat the object whose behaviour is to be predicted as a rational agent, then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. (1987: 17)

So Davidson and Dennett present a kind of normative functionalism. It is a functionalism which employs a psychological theory that is constrained by rationality. A shorthand version of the psychological theory would be this: By and large subjects have the state of mind it is rational for them to have in the circumstances. By and large subjects do what it is rational for them to do given their state of mind.

If it were possible to specify fully what was rational then this shorthand theory could be expanded to a longhand theory with this specification of rationality substituted in. This would mean that any normative language became incidental to the theory. The theory would look something like this: In situation S1 with state of mind M1 a subject’s state of mind will change to M1* and that person will act in way A1 (and that is rational).

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The Inner Life of a Rational Agent In situation S2 with state of mind M2 a subject’s state of mind will change to M2* and that person will act in way A2 (and that is rational). ...

But there are reasons to doubt whether rationality could be fully specified. For any attempted specification of rationality we can always ask the question: ‘Why is that rational?’ It is always an open question whether one should (rationally) act according to any particular specification of rationality. And this means that no particular specification of rationality captures the whole concept of rationality.17 This argument is developed in the Chapter 6. The idea that will be defended is that rationality is essentially dynamic, changing itself in the light of problems that any particular version of rationality faces in use at a time. Rationality turns out to be a continuant – persisting and changing through time in the way that a material object does.18 No description of what is rational at a certain time can constitute a full and final specification of rationality. This means that any normative psychological theory must actually employ normative vocabulary – it is irreducibly normative. A fully specified theory, where all references to what ought to happen or what is rational or what is correct are eliminated in favour of a nonnormative specification, is not a possibility. Indeed, the shorthand specification of the theory given above may be the only psychological theory available that is not subject to revision in the light of the development of rationality.

IV An Argument against Normative Functionalism I have made as much sense as I can of functionalism by developing it into normative functionalism, but I think that normative functionalism itself suffers from an irresolvable internal tension. A normative theory of behaviour amounts to something like this: By and large subjects have the state of mind it is rational for them to have in the circumstances. By and large subjects do what it is rational for them to do given their state of mind.

So for every state of mind, m, we have: If in the circumstances, m is the rational state of mind for subjects to be in then by and large they will be in state m. If in the circumstances there is some action, a, that it is rational for subjects to do given that they are in state of mind m, then by and large they will do a.

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Its Ramsey sentence is the following: There is a state of a subject, x, such that if in the circumstances, x is the rational state for subjects to be in then by and large they will be in x and if in the circumstances there is some action, a, that it is rational for subjects to do given that they are in state of mind x, then by and large they will do a.

This Ramsey sentence is not much good for the functionalist’s purposes. As is stands it does not give us any way to discriminate either between different types of mental state – beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, and so on, or different contents of these mental states. So we should add in a bit of detail about what psychological rationality consists in. I have suggested that it is not possible to spell out what rationality consists in completely. But it should be possible to construct partial and revisable theories that will suffice for fixing our mental concepts. For example, what seems to be essential to belief is that it should adapt to the world if it fails to match up. This is what philosophers have called the direction of fit of belief. It is the other way around for desires and intentions. If they fail to match up with the world the world should adapt to them (via the process of the subject with the desires and intentions acting). The direction of fit is a normative relation. It is not just that beliefs tend to change if they fail to match the world. What is crucial is that they ought to change. The fact that beliefs are subject to norms is what allows us to describe them as true or false, and that beliefs are describable as true or false is part of their nature. So part of the normative psychological theory that might fix the meaning of belief (if you are a functionalist) might be something like the following: If it is apparent to subjects that it is raining and subjects do not believe that it is raining, then they should believe that it is raining, and as a result by and large they will believe that it is raining.

The part of the Ramsey sentence of the psychological theory that corresponds to this would be the following: There is a state of the subject, call it x, such that if it is apparent to the subject that it is raining and the subject is not in state x, then the subject should be in state x and as a result by and large he or she will be.

But there is something wrong with this Ramsey sentence. According to functionalism generally, what it is to be in a certain state of mind

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is to be in some state, whatever it is, that has a certain role in a psychological theory of behaviour. The Ramsey sentence of the theory must work as a theory of behaviour, and the meaning of the mental terms can then be given in terms of roles of the bound variables of the Ramsey sentence they correspond with. This means that the Ramsey sentence must be establishable independently of understanding the meanings of the mental terms. But this normative Ramsey sentence cannot be established in advance of knowing what sort of mental state is going to take the place of the variable. The theorist could never be in a position of knowing that there is some state that a subject should be in when it is apparent that it is raining without knowing already that the state in question is believing (or perhaps knowing) that it is raining. Now it is possible in general to establish some normative claims that have hidden variables in them. For example, I might think that somebody ought to do something about public transport in the UK, without first knowing who or what. But it is not possible to establish the claim that there is a state of a person which should adapt to the fact that it is raining, without first identifying that state as the belief that it is raining. This is by contrast with the causal claim that there is a state of a person which does adapt to the fact that it is raining. This causal claim might be established as part of an overall causal theory without having established the nature of the state in advance. Non-normative functionalism depends on Ramsey sentences making causal explanatory sense. The idea is that you can construct a causal explanatory theory without using mental predicates and then give the mental predicates their sense by pairing them off with the terms in such a theory. But we have seen that a psychological theory of behaviour must do more than make causal explanatory sense. It must make rational sense of the subject. And the fact that applying mental predicates to a subject makes rational sense of them is central to the meaning of these predicates. The problem is that a Ramsey sentence of a psychological theory makes no rational sense of a subject. If we take a psychological state and abstract from its being a specific belief or a specific desire and just consider it as some state whose correct description can wait until later, then we cannot attribute any normative significance to being in that state. We may be able to attribute causal significance to a state of unknown description. We can tell a psychologically explanatory story with black boxes figuring in

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the story and having causal significance. We might say that such and such inputs combine with a state of unknown nature to produce such and such an output. But we are in no position to say that it is rational to be in that state or that it is rational to respond to that state in some way. Black boxes cannot have normative significance. We cannot be in a position to say that such and such inputs combine with a state of unknown nature to make some output rational. We have to know the nature of the unknown state in order to be in a position to attribute desirability to the output. So far I have only considered a fragment of the relevant Ramsey sentence. The key thing about beliefs is not just that they should adapt to apparent facts; they should also combine with other beliefs and desires to yield goal-directed behaviour. So the belief that it is raining combined with the belief that carrying an umbrella is the best way to stay dry and the desire to stay dry should result in the action of carrying an umbrella. The complete Ramsey sentence should look more like this: There are states of the subject, x, y, z, . . . such that if it is apparent to the subject that it is raining and the subject is not in state x, then the subject should be in state x and by large will be, and if it is apparent to the subject that carrying an umbrella is the best way to stay dry in the rain, then the subject should be in state y and by and large will be, and if the subject is in state x and in state y and state z then he or she should carry an umbrella, and . . .

The full Ramsey sentence would go on like this for ever. But the key point remains untouched by any of this complexity. No such Ramsey sentence could be established independently of knowing what mental terms are supposed to take the place of the variables. If attributing a state of mind to a subject makes that subject rationally intelligible this is not then due to the role that that type of state of mind has in a psychological theory explaining the subject’s behaviour. What makes behaviour rational is the relationship that behaviour has to situations in the world. According to functionalism, what it is to be in that state of mind is to be in a state of whatever type that has that role in the psychological theory explaining your behaviour. But, as I have argued, this means that, according to functionalism, attributing a state of mind to a subject does not in itself make that subject rationally intelligible. So much the worse for functionalism.

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V Theory Theory and Simulation Theory As I claimed in section I, functionalism may be decomposed into the following elements: 1. Meanings of mental terms depend on their role in the practices that employ those terms. 2. The practice in which mental terms are attributed is that of explaining behaviour. 3. Behaviour is explained by a structured theory not by a set of isolated claims.

The second and third elements together constitute an approach to the attribution of mental terms now often known as theory theory. According to theory theory you understand people by working out a psychological theory of them. This will be a theory that explains a person’s beliefs, desires and actions in terms of his or her environmental inputs and other beliefs, desires, and so on. Once you have such a theory you are supposed to be able to superimpose it on the way people are reacting to their environment and work out what they must be thinking and wanting. This will involve solving (albeit implicitly) huge simultaneous equations. It is not supposed by most theory theorists that this sort of use of psychological theory is completely conscious. Much of this theory manipulation is supposed to be automatic. Most attribution of mental states is just rough and ready, and uses a fair amount of guesswork as well as other heuristics. The key point of theory theory is not one about the actual psychological process of making sense of someone’s behaviour. Instead it is about the structure of entitlements involved in such attribution. The claim is that our entitlement to attribute a mental state to someone depends on knowledge – albeit not entirely conscious knowledge – of psychological theory and on our knowledge of how that person’s way of behaving fits into that theory. The actual process of interpretation must roughly track this structure of entitlements, but it does not have to follow it inference by inference. In current philosophy of mind, theory theory is very often opposed to simulation theory.19 Simulation theory starts from the fact that we cannot understand other people without understanding their essentially personal perspective on the world. To be conscious of the world is to have a perspective on the world. So to understand another person’s behaviour as the behaviour of a conscious person you must understand his or her perspective.

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According to simulation theory, a perspective cannot be specified in terms of a scientific or quasi-scientific theory. Perspectives can only be specified using demonstrative or indexical terms like ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘half a mile ahead’, ‘now’, ‘ten seconds ago’, ‘me’, ‘you’, and so on. Such terms do not figure in scientific theories and it does not look plausible that they could be reduced to the terms of such theories.20 Equally a perspective depends on a particular structure of qualitative concepts. I perceive an apple as red, as tasting nice, as being safe, and so on. These concepts are essential to my perspective but have no place in scientific theory. Perspectives also employ essentially normative concepts that do not figure in scientific theories. A perspective should be thought of as a way of determining how a subject should describe the world and how they should act within the world. And to understand another’s perspective you must understand the way of providing norms for judgement and action that they have employed. A non-normative theory could only attempt to explain people by giving an account of how they do behave and what they do believe. It could not give an account of how they should behave and what they should believe, and therefore it would not really give an account of their perspective.21 According to simulation theory we cannot understand another’s perspective without sharing that perspective. So the way to understand someone is to put oneself in that person’s shoes to engage in a process of imaginative identification or simulation of his or her perspective. To understand how you see the world I have to see it that way myself. And since I cannot actually employ your very own perspective, the best approximation I can achieve to understanding you is to project myself imaginatively into your situation to impersonate your way of thinking and acting and seeing the world. By reflecting on how things seem to me when simulating you I can understand how things are for you. But I think this may be more than is really required for psychological understanding. In understanding someone we must ourselves employ a perspective that engages with that person’s perspective. A scientific or quasi-scientific theory that employs no qualitative, normative or perspective-specific language won’t do. But it does not follow that the whole approach of theory theory is mistaken; it may employ essentially perspectival normative theories of behaviour. Nor does it follow that we have to employ or pretend to employ that person’s very own perspective.

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Consider the example of trying to understand what it is for someone to be feeling unbearable pain. It seems fairly obvious that an impersonal quasi-scientific theory of pain behaviour will not give one the required understanding. But simulating having unbearable pain oneself does not seem to be a necessary or even appropriate part of the process either. It seems absurd to think that the key to understanding this person is to grimace and groan: ‘I cannot bear this pain.’ This simulation is obviously surplus to requirements for genuine understanding of the other person’s state. It is at the same time inappropriate; for if one gets too close to the other person’s perspective, one will lose the objectivity that is essential for genuine understanding. Objectivity requires separation. Of course, imagination does have some role in the attempt to understand other people. If you have never experienced unbearable pain yourself you may need to imagine experiencing it just to acquire the right concepts with which to describe how it is for another person. But this use of the imagination as a way of honing one’s concepts falls very far short of using the imagination to simulate someone’s perspective. Understanding someone’s perspective requires one to employ a perspective oneself which is sensitive to the other person’s perspective; it involves responding appropriately to the way that other person sees the world; but the attempt to get actually inside that other person’s perspective is a mistake.

VI Conclusion Functionalism may be broken down into three elements: 1. Meanings of mental terms depend on their role in the practices that employ those terms. 2. The practice in which mental terms are attributed is that of explaining behaviour. 3. Behaviour is explained by a structured theory not by a set of isolated claims. As I see it, behaviourism and functionalism share the first element. Indeed, it would be difficult to find an approach to meaning that did not accept this element in some form. The second element is more controversial. The standard view from Descartes until the end of the nineteenth century (call it Cartesianism for want of a better term) was that the appropriate practice had nothing to do with explaining behaviour, but rather was the practice of reporting on one’s own mind.

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But introspection by itself does not amount to the sort of practice that could give mental language its meaning. The central element of functionalism is the claim that it is the psychological practice of explaining behaviour that gives mental language its meaning. And the central element of what I have called normative functionalism is the claim that this practice must be one of making sense of behaviour or interpreting behaviour. Putting this together with the first element gives a position sometimes described as ‘interpretationism’. According to this position, the meanings of mental terms are determined by their roles in the practice of making sense of behaviour. It follows that what it is to have a certain state of mind is to be such that attributing that state of mind to you makes best sense of your behaviour. Simulation theory may accept this interpretationism, but will reject the third element that requires making sense of someone’s behaviour to be a matter of applying a theory to that person. Normative functionalism accepts that it is a matter of applying a theory to that person, but denies that the theory will be an impersonal scientific theory. It will be a theory that rationalises behaviour at the same time as explaining behaviour. I have argued that the normative claims in a theory that makes sense of behaviour cannot depend on the roles of the variables that take the place of mental terms in that theory. You cannot make sense of someone’s behaviour in terms of a Ramsey sentence. This means that I deny that the practice in which mental terms are attributed is that of making sense of behaviour. It must be possible to make rational sense of behaviour quite independently of attributing mental states. This leaves room for the behaviourist to say that the practice of attributing mental states to someone follows on from the practice of making rational sense of that person’s behaviour. We can see someone as behaving in a certain (norm-governed) way and then attribute a state of mind to him or her accordingly. Like the Cartesian, the behaviourist denies the second element of the functionalist position. But unlike the Cartesian, the behaviourist does not take the interpretation of behaviour to be irrelevant to the practice of attributing mental states. The behaviourist takes the practice of attributing mental states to depend on the practice of interpreting behaviour not to be part of it. For this to work there must be a conception of practical rationality that does not employ mental terms or variables in place of mental terms. Articulating such a conception is the task of Chapter 6.

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The key difference then between functionalism and behaviourism is the following: Functionalism What it is for a person to satisfy a mental predicate is determined by the role of that mental predicate in an overall psychological theory of the explanation of his or her behaviour. So attributing a state of mind is part of explaining behaviour. Behaviourism What it is for a person to satisfy a mental predicate is for his or her behaviour to be explained in a certain way. So attributing a state of mind follows from explaining behaviour.

Notes 1. Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior (1959) and Newell and Simon’s work in the late 1950s (Newell et al. 1958) on computational models of problem-solving are often taken to mark the beginning of cognitive science. 2. See in particular Locke ([1690] 1975: book 2). 3. Quine worked with a dualism between theory and observation, according to which observation data were given while the theory was negotiable. But a more thoroughgoing holism would deny that there was any fixed sensory support for the ‘arch’ of theory, and that theory and observation fit together into an overall way of describing things which is all negotiable. See Sellars (1963: Chapter 1) on the myth of the given. 4. Such sentences were constructed by Frank Ramsey ([1926] 1978: Chapter 4) as a means of comparing theories that use different terms. 5. A variant of this idea, one defended by functionalists like Lewis (1983: Chapter 9) and Putnam (1975: Chapter 16) right from the beginning, has it that you are in pain if you are in that state, whatever it is, that normally has the role in us that pain has in psychological theory. This allows the possibility of subjects being in a state that does not function in them like pain usually does, but that is nevertheless pain, since that is how that state usually functions in people. It won’t make any difference that I only consider the simpler version in which the role a state has in the subject’s own functioning, rather than the role that state has in people more generally, is taken to be central. 6. Functionalists have usually also assumed that mental states are natural kinds, but I can ignore this for present purposes. 7. See Putnam’s 1967 article ‘Psychological Predicates’, reprinted as ‘The Nature of Mental States’ in Putnam (1975: Chapter 21), Armstrong (1968), and Lewis’s 1972 article ‘Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications’. While pioneering functionalism as a theory of the mind,

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

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these philosophers were really just picking up ideas that had been around from the late 1950s with the birth of cognitive psychology on the one hand and the application of holism to positivist and pragmatist conceptions of the mind with Carnap, Quine and Sellars on the other. See for example Rey (1997: Chapter 8), who introduces what he calls the Computational Representational Theory of Thought, according to which mental states are assumed to have the internal structure of computational representational states. Stich now claims to have lost confidence in this argument for eliminitivism (1996: Chapter 1) This idea is defended by Lewis (1972). It demands an explanation that is not causal at all according to Anscombe, but that is another issue; see Chapter 4. In Chapter 5 I develop the argument for the conclusion that the explanation of action must be normative. The term ‘rationality’ has become a philosophical battleground; see Mele and Rawlings (2004). I will try to make my use of the term clearer in Chapter 6. See Peter Goldie (2000: Chapter 5). See Davidson’s, ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’, in Davidson (1980: essay 1), and his ‘Mental Events’, in Davidson (1980: essay 11). Bill Child (1994: Chapter 1) describes this as ‘interpretationism’. This is a version of G. E. Moore’s famous (1903) ‘Open question’ argument against what he called the naturalistic fallacy in ethics. This mirrors the claim in the previous section that any scientific theory should be regarded as a dynamic evolving thing – a continuant in other words. See for example Heal (1986). See Bill Brewer (2002) for an argument that no reference to spatial particulars can be had without employing such demonstratives, and Perry (1979) for an argument that action cannot be explained except by reasons that employ such demonstratives or indexicals. See Burwood, Gilbert and Lennon (1999: Chapter 5) for a clear exposition of the approach they describe as ‘perspectivalism’. Their claim is that understanding a mind requires understanding a perspective; and so no reductive account of mind is possible.

4

Dispositions to Behave

I The Argument from Causation One of the standard arguments against philosophical behaviourism is the argument from causation. According to behaviourism, describing someone’s state of mind is describing how that person is disposed to behave. But, according to this standard argument, in describing someone’s state of mind you are really describing what makes that person disposed to act in the way he or she does, not simply that that person is disposed to act that way. So, by this argument, behaviourism misrepresents the causal role of the mind.1 According to behaviourism the relation represented by the bottom left arrow in Figure 4.1 is that of identity – mental states just are dispositions to behave. Behaviourists differ as to how to construe the relation represented by the bottom right arrow. But I shall argue that it is one of causation. The argument from causation has two separate versions corresponding to these two arrows. In one version it is claimed that the lefthand arrow should represent the relation of causation, whereas behaviourism takes it to represent identity. It is claimed that states of mind themselves causally explain dispositions to behave and so cannot themselves simply be dispositions to behave. The other version claims that the right-hand arrow should not represent the relation of causation. It is argued that whereas a state of mind can cause behaviour, a disposition to behave cannot; it is not properly separate from the behaviour, as a cause should be from its effect. The first of these objections is made by some functionalists against behaviourism. They identify a state of mind not with a disposition to behave in a certain way but with whatever it is that causes the disposition to behave in that way.2 They would say that someone’s wanting a cup of tea is what makes the person disposed to act in ways characteristic of that desire. Someone’s believing that today is Thursday is what makes the person disposed to behave in ways that work on that

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Behaviour

Mental state

Disposition to behave

Figure 4.1

Mental states, dispositions and behaviour

assumption. But for the behaviourist, wanting a cup of tea or believing that today is Thursday is just being disposed to behave in those ways and so cannot be what makes the person so disposed. A behaviourist may accept that some dispositions to behave can cause other dispositions to behave. So wanting a cup of tea and believing that today is Thursday may indeed cause the person to be disposed to behave in certain ways. But the behaviourist should simply deny that the disposition to behave in the way that defines a certain state of mind is caused by being in that state of mind. The plausibility of this denial depends ultimately on the success of the account of dispositions that is offered, an account in which dispositions to behave are causally separate from the behaviour itself. I will sketch such an account myself in response to the second version of the causal argument against dispositional behaviourism. In this second version, it is argued that a disposition to behave cannot cause someone to behave any more that a dormitive virtue can cause someone to sleep. But a state of mind can cause someone to behave. So a state of mind cannot be a disposition. Here is the argument laid out more formally: 1. My wanting some milk may causally explain my going to the shop. 2. My disposition to do whatever is best to obtain some milk just consists in the fact that if some behaviour is the best way to obtain some milk then I will behave in that way. 3. The mere fact that if X is the best way to obtain some milk I will do X does not causally explain why I go to the shop when that is the best way to obtain some milk. 4. Therefore my wanting some milk cannot just consist in the disposition to do whatever is best to obtain some milk.

A behaviourist, wanting to reject the conclusion of this argument, might consider rejection of the first premise. Philosophers like Ryle (1949), Wittgenstein (1958), Anscombe (1957), Melden (1961) and von Wright (1971) seem to have been pushed by this or similar arguments to question whether states of mind really do causally explain

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behaviour. And if the top arrow in Figure 4.1 is not taken to represent the relation of causation, then there is no need for the bottom right arrow to either. The thought roughly would be that when I say I went to the shop because I wanted some milk I am not describing something that made me go to the shop; I am putting my going to the shop in a context that makes it rationally explicable. How then does citing a motive explain an action? Certainly, with respect to the instance we have been describing [that is, explaining someone’s raising his or her hand in order to signal], stating the motive is not offering a (Humean) causal explanation of the action. The explanation does not refer us to some other event – the motive – which explains causally how the action comes to be . . . But as we have seen, the explanation of the action given by the statement of the motive or intention explains in a two-fold way: first it provides us with a better understanding of the action itself by placing it with its appropriate context; and, second, it reveals something about the agent himself. (Melden 1961: 102)

It is significant, as I shall argue, that Melden here rejects only what he calls Humean causal explanation of action in terms of motives and intentions. This is the sort of causal explanation where the occurrence of one event is supposed to explain the occurrence of another event that it makes happen in virtue of there being a regularity or law which the occurrence of these two events instantiates. This leaves open the possibility of another sort of causal explanation, a possibility I will explore in this chapter. But Melden does not offer up any alternative sort of causal explanation, and it is reasonable to describe his view as anti-causalist. If we make no assumptions about what type of causal explanation is being discussed, then I think anti-causalism is not the right place to start. The explanation of my going to the shop that cites my wanting some milk provides some information about the causal process that resulted in my going to the shop, and in that respect is a causal explanation. So I will not try to deny the first premise of the argument laid out above, even though it will be important to question exactly in what sense facts about states of mind provide causal explanations of behaviour. The third premise is probably irreproachable, though we have to be very careful about the wording. In general the mere truth of the claim that if A then B cannot causally explain why B given A. This really would be one thing causally explaining itself. And in the same way the mere fact that if X then Y does not causally explain why

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B given A, where B is an instance of Y and A is an instance of X. A generalisation does not causally explain a particular instance of itself. This brings us to the second premise. To assess this it is necessary to consider in some detail what it means to say that someone is disposed to behave in a certain way in certain circumstances. I will argue that a disposition is not just the truth of a conditional statement. Instead, a disposition is a state of potentiality in a thing, where that potentiality is described by the conditional statement. David Armstrong (1968: 56 and 85ff.) also argues that dispositions (states of mind) may cause behaviour, but assumes that this stops his theory from counting as behaviourist, since behaviourism, according to Armstrong, must deny that states of mind are hidden causes of behaviour. What can the Behaviourist make of the interaction of mind and body? As we have already argued, the following sequence appears to be a causal one: (a) my hand is hit; (b) I feel pain; (c) I wring my hand. We want to say that the blow makes me feel pain, and the pain in turn makes me wring my hand. Can the Behaviourist treat this as a causal sequence? For him the pain is simply a disposition or tendency, a disposition or tendency manifested in things like wringing one’s hand. Can he say that the blow causes the disposition (which is the pain) which causes the wringing? Since the whole point of Behaviourism is to deny the existence of inner mental events between the physical stimulus and the physical response, he cannot. (Armstrong 1968: 56)

My approach to this argument is going to be to argue that a behaviourist should accept that states of mind (dispositions to behave in certain ways) do in some sense come between the physical stimulus and the physical response. But we have to clarify exactly what sense this is. The way a state of mind is a cause is very different from the way a physical stimulus is a cause. States of mind are what I shall call ‘framework causes’ of behaviour, not ‘input causes’. And this means that the idea of a ‘causal sequence’ with states of mind as elements in the sequence on a par with physical stimuli and responses turns out to be a mistake. The pain in my hand does cause me to wring my hand in certain circumstances; it does not just consist in my wringing my hand in those circumstances. But the disposition to wring my hands in those circumstances is not the same thing as my simply wringing my hands in those circumstances either. One of my tasks in this chapter is to explain how a disposition to behave in a certain way in certain circumstances is distinct from simply behaving that way in those circumstances.

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In the same sort of way my wanting some milk to make a milky coffee does causally explain why I go out to the shop when it is clear that this is the best way to obtain some milk. So my wanting some milk cannot just consist in the fact that I will go out to the shop when that is the best way to obtain some milk. Nor can it consist in a more general fact that includes that behaviour as just one instance – for example the fact that I will do what is the best thing to do to obtain some milk. The state of mind must be separate from the behaviour that it is supposed to causally explain. I will try to show that this is quite compatible with describing the state of mind as a disposition to behave in a certain way. The sense in which states of mind are hidden causes of behaviour is the same as the sense in which the nature of salt that is its solubility is a hidden cause of its dissolving in water. States of mind are hidden only in the way that dispositions generally are hidden. Being disposed to behave in a certain way in certain circumstances is to be identified with being in a state whose working can be described by the conditional statement that if those circumstances arise you will behave that way. I will argue that being in such a state can causally explain why you behave that way in those circumstances.

II Ryle’s Dispositions My first task is to show that being disposed to behave in a certain way is a state of the subject. This is a claim that seems to be denied by Ryle in his influential (1949: Chapter 5) treatment of dispositions. Although Ryle’s approach to causation is both old-fashioned and extremely limited, it is a useful starting point for my purposes. I want to show that a dispositional approach to the mind like Ryle’s can employ a perfectly good realist conception of a causal disposition, even accepting Ryle’s claims about the pragmatic entitlements associated with disposition statements. Ryle claimed that ‘the mind is not the topic of sets of untestable categorical propositions, but the topic of sets of testable hypothetical and semi-hypothetical propositions’ (1949: 46). He thought that to describe someone’s state of mind is to attribute a behavioural disposition to the person; and he thought that statements about dispositions, like statements of laws, are ‘true or false but they do not state truths or falsehoods of the same type as those asserted by the statements of fact to which they apply or are supposed to apply. They have different jobs . . . A law is used as, so to speak, an inference ticket (a season

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ticket) which licences its possessors to move from asserting factual statements to asserting other factual statements’ (1949: 121). 3 Ryle’s claim that a disposition statement is an inference ticket amounts to the claim that if you are entitled to accept the authority of the disposition statement then you are thereby entitled to make certain inferences in the right circumstances. These inferences may be made explicit in the form of a conditional statement or a law. To say that John knows French, according to Ryle, is to claim an entitlement to make certain inferences about how John will behave from statements about what sort of situation he is in. Roughly speaking, it is to assert the right to expect him to ‘cope pretty well with the majority of ordinary French-using and French-following tasks’ (1949: 124). Ryle contrasted the pragmatic job of being an inference ticket with the pragmatic job of stating facts. He thought that the role of disposition statements was not to report facts. They did not assert of mentioned objects that they possess specific attributes (1949: 120). This suggests that Ryle accepted the sort of anti-realism about the mind that I rejected in Chapter 2, section III. Ryle’s apparent attempt to divide statements into two categories, those that report facts and those that do not, looks like the sort of dualism that he was so concerned to oppose. Statements about the mind are disposition statements, which, according to Ryle, do not report facts. It seems to follow that the only genuine attributions of properties to individuals – the ones that report facts – are non-mental attributions. If one has put together all the facts that can be reported using dispositionally uninfected statements, one has described a world which mental attributions do not report facts about. It follows that mental attributions along with all other disposition statements are either true of a different world or, if they are true of the same world, are only true in a rather second-hand sort of way. However, Ryle did accept that disposition statements were capable of being true and false, and he was in fact quite happy to talk of mental terms and dispositional statements as describing us and the way we behave, even though the linguistic function of such description was taken to be different from that of non-mental or non-dispositional descriptions. So assuming that his aim was just to attack a certain view of the pragmatics of disposition statements, then he overstated his case by making what looks like a strong metaphysical claim that disposition statements do not report matters of fact. There appears to be a perfectly good, minimal, sense in which if a disposition statement is

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true it reports a fact and in reporting a fact about something it attributes a property to it. So we may reject Ryle’s claim that disposition statements do not report matters of fact or attribute properties to things. From what Ryle says generally about causation it seems that what he was really after anyway was to deny that disposition statements assert the existence of some unobservable causal attribute (Ryle 1949: 122). But if this means that Ryle was denying the existence of something in the object, some underlying nature, which would entitle one to make the corresponding inferences, then, I shall argue here, we should reject that too. The notion of a stand-alone inference ticket is absurd. A licence gets its authority by being nested in a wider system of entitlements. There are several things that might be thought to give authority to an inference ticket: testimony, induction, or perhaps the underlying causal nature of the system. For example, suppose that I am entitled to infer from the fact that John is faced with a French-using task that John will cope reasonably well. One possible, though unlikely, source of authority for this inference ticket is my personal genie who has emerged from a magic lamp and granted my wish to have such an inference ticket. Accordingly the genie has committed to use magic to make John cope reasonably well if John gets into such a situation. Another source of authority for this inference ticket might simply be the underlying causal nature of John. In both cases I am entitled to say that John will cope reasonably well if he is faced with a Frenchusing task, but only in the second case might I be entitled to describe John as having the disposition to cope well with French-using tasks and hence as knowing French. To attribute a disposition to John – for example to say that he knows French – is not just to say that one is entitled to infer various things about John’s behaviour; it is also to say that it is something about John that gives one that entitlement. Perhaps one can use the word ‘disposition’ without being committed to an underlying causal nature. There may be a thin sense of the word in which it is right to say of John in the genie case that he is disposed to cope reasonably well if he is faced with a French-using task. But the dispositions that are ascribed when one describes someone’s state of mind clearly do involve such causal commitment. The same goes for the dispositions one ascribes when one says that a glass is fragile, sugar is soluble or a wire conducts electricity. These are not bare dispositions. If one were only entitled to one’s inference ticket from the fact that a glass is treated roughly to the fact that it will break by the good services of a magic genie who promised to break

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the glass whenever it was treated roughly, then one would not be entitled to attribute fragility to the glass. To require that a disposition statement is grounded in the existence of some underlying nature in the object is not to compromise Ryle’s claims about the distinctive pragmatics of disposition statements. It certainly does not follow that attributing the disposition to something is the same as attributing to it any particular features of this underlying causal nature. The second-order attribution to an object of the property of having some hidden constitution that entitles people to infer things about the object’s future behaviour should not be identified with the first-order attribution to the object of that hidden constitution. The secondorder attribution can be made when the first-order attribution cannot be (and vice-versa). So saying that something is fragile is not the same as saying that it has such-and-such an underlying constitution (where ‘such-and-such’ is to be filled in by a crystallographer for instance). It is to say that it has some underlying constitution that entitles one to infer from its being treated roughly that it will break. Consider the analogy with describing someone as extraordinary. Suppose for the sake of argument that this is the same as describing the person as having some property that is not normally possessed by people. This is clearly not at all the same as describing that person as having an IQ of over 180, supposing that is his or her unusual property. And this is the case even if we were to work with a parsimonious metaphysics that identified the property of the person’s extraordinariness with the property of his or her having an IQ of over 180. That describing someone as having a certain disposition is not the same as attributing to that person that property whatever it is that underlies the disposition stands quite independently of any issue about the identities of such properties.4 So, to say that something is disposed to behave in a certain way is to say that it has some underlying nature that entitles one to make a certain structure of inferences about its behaviour. These inferences can be characterised in terms of conditional statements or laws. The entitlement to make these inferences must be taken to be subject to various other conditions being met. On the one hand, there are the normal operational conditions of the disposition. It may be inconvenient or impossible to specify these conditions within the conditional statements that characterise the disposition. And also there is the condition that nothing interferes with the disposition. Together these conditions are often captured just by saying ‘other things being

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equal’. So a disposition is a state of something that, subject to operational conditions being met and nothing interfering, entitles one to make a certain structure of inferences characterised by certain conditional statements or laws. We can phrase this in a more metaphysical and less pragmatic way by eliminating this talk of entitlements. We can say that when something is disposed to behave in a certain way it is in a state which will have a certain structure of results (characterised by a law or conditional statement) when its operational conditions are met and nothing interferes.

III Dispositions and Causal Explanation A disposition statement, in asserting the existence of a state which will have a certain structure of results in certain circumstances, is making a commitment to a causally active nature – a power or mechanism. So disposition statements should figure in causal explanations. This is something that Ryle denies: There are two quite different senses in which an occurrence is said to be ‘explained’ . . . The first sense is the causal sense. To ask why the glass broke is to ask what caused it to break, and we explain, in this sense, the fracture of the glass when we report that a stone hit it. The ‘because’ clause in the explanation reports an event, namely the event which stood to the fracture of the glass as cause to effect. But very equivalently we look for and get explanations of occurrences in another sense of ‘explanation’. We ask why the glass shivered when struck by the stone and we get the answer that it was because the glass was brittle. (1949: 88)

Like Melden, quoted earlier in the chapter, Ryle here is really denying that disposition statements report events that are causes. When Ryle denies that explaining an action by citing someone’s motives or inclination is explaining it in a causal sense, he means that motives ‘are not happenings and are not therefore of the right type to be causes. The expansion of a motive-expression is a law-like sentence and not a report of an event’ (1949: 113). So this leaves it open to say that both the report of the event of the stone hitting the glass and the statement of the fragility of the glass contribute to the causal explanation of the glass breaking but in different ways. This is what is said in the inferentialist approach to (causal) explanation.5 According to this approach, the first part of an explanation provides or presupposes a structure of laws (or inference tickets). This is a way of inferring the future behaviour of a system

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from earlier occurrences and states. The second part must provide or presuppose a specification of the earlier occurrences or states of the system from which one can infer, using the structure of laws, the behaviour that is to be explained. So the two parts of an inferential explanation are respectively some kind of model or set of laws of the behaviour of the system and a way of seeing how the phenomenon in question fits into this model or set of laws. Causal understanding of why a phenomenon occurs consists in general theoretical knowledge of the workings of some system (knowledge of its dispositions that entitles one to make certain inferences spelt out in the form of laws) and particular knowledge of how the phenomenon fits into such workings. So disposition statements provide the framework of a causal explanation while reports of events and prior states – the inputs to the framework – locate the phenomenon to be explained in that framework.6 The fragility of the glass is a framework cause and the event of the stone hitting it is an input cause. On the inferentialist model of causal explanation there are two kinds of reason that may be cited. You cannot explain one fact just by citing other particular facts. You also have to show how the various facts relate to one another. According to the inferentialist approach this is done by making clear what it is that enables one to move from these other particular facts to the fact in question.7 And for this you must appeal to laws of some sort. There is a big question concerning what, if anything, laws correspond to metaphysically. On one side is the Humean view that there is nothing in the world that has an inferential structure corresponding to that of laws; laws merely represent a regularity or constant conjunction. This view has a hard time accounting for our entitlement to make inferences about the behaviour of physical systems. On the other is the Aristotelian view that potentialities (or dispositions) exist in things and when these potentialities are realised – when the operational and non-interference conditions are met – a causal process is happening. The laws describe these potentialities. This is the view that I have been taking here. Talk of dispositions goes hand in hand with talk of mechanisms. I do not mean my talk of mechanisms that follows to carry any further implications than talk about dispositions. If I can say that two bodies are disposed to attract one another according to Newton’s Law of Gravity I am thereby entitled to talk about the existence of a mechanism of gravitation resulting in their attraction. But no further

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commitment is entered into by this sort of talk. Equally, when we say that a person is disposed to behave in a certain way, we can also say that he or she embodies a mechanism that results in that sort of behaviour. Disposition statements describe the dispositional properties of a system. And these dispositional properties constitute a mechanism, as I am using the term. The disposition statements that describe a mechanism entitle a structure of inferences, which may be made explicit in the form of a set of laws. So we can say that this set of laws describes how the mechanism works. For example, in attributing fragility to a glass we are asserting the existence of a mechanism in the glass, which is an it-will-break-if-struck mechanism. The approach to dispositions that I am recommending is endorsed by U. T. Place as follows:8 Dispositional properties of particular things are the substantive laws, not, as for Armstrong, of nature in general but of the nature of the individual entities whose dispositional properties they are. (2004: 101)

We must distinguish carefully between the use of a conditional statement as a straightforward assertion and the use of a conditional statement as a way of describing how some mechanism works. There is a distinction between on the one hand simply claiming that if A then B and on the other claiming that there exists an if-A-then-B mechanism. The existence of a mechanism whose working is described by a conditional statement is not the same as the truth of that statement. Indeed, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of the mechanism described by a conditional statement or of the disposition characterised by that statement that that conditional statement be actually true. Consider the example of the mechanism of leaf loss in autumn in deciduous trees.9 The way this mechanism works might be described by saying that if the nights are drawing in then the leaves turn brown, die and fall off. I know that the actual mechanism is more complicated and interesting than that, but this will serve for the example. The presence of this mechanism amounts to the fact that the leaves of the tree are disposed to turn and fall when the nights draw in. And this disposition will be present even if the conditional statement, ‘If the nights draw in the leaves on the tree will turn and fall,’ is false. The conditional statement might be false if some mad botanist is going to interfere with the tree, recolour the leaves and stick them on with glue when they show signs of turning. The presence of this

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mad botanist does not stop the leaves being disposed to turn and fall even though it does stop the conditional statement being true. Equally the mad botanist might make the conditional statement true even though the tree is evergreen and its leaves are not disposed to turn and fall. The botanist is standing by waiting for the nights to draw in ready to paint the leaves brown and pull them off. The presence of the mad botanist in this case does not mean that the leaves are disposed to turn and fall when the nights draw in, even though the conditional statement is now true. Although the conditional statement is true it does not describe the working of the mechanism in the leaves of the tree. For a conditional statement, if A then B, to describe the working of a mechanism what is necessary is that whenever the mechanism is working properly and A occurs then B will result. It is irrelevant what happens when the mechanism is not working properly. Now the mechanism is working properly when some set of operational conditions are met and nothing is interfering with it. This suggests that the existence of a mechanism or disposition may be characterised by the truth of a conditional statement after all; it would be a more complex conditional claim of the following form: if the operational conditions are met and nothing is interfering and if A, then B. But this does not look like a very useful move since there is no reason to suppose that these operational conditions and interference conditions can, even in theory, be spelt out. The existence of a mechanism described by some conditional statement may indeed be a cause. For example, the existence of the mechanism whose working is described by the conditional statement: ‘If the glass is hit by a stone it will break’ may cause that very behaviour to occur when that circumstance arises. The arising of the circumstance – the stone hitting the glass – may also be a cause of the behaviour. But the two causes are very different kinds of causes. One is a framework cause and the other is an input cause. A framework cause is the existence of a disposition or mechanism, like the mechanism of gravitation, the mechanism of autumnal leaf loss in deciduous trees, the mechanism of fragility in a glass, and so on. Input causes are events or facts that feed into these mechanisms. The events that make up the approach of winter feed into the mechanism of autumnal leaf loss in deciduous trees to result in the leaves on an oak tree turning and falling off. The event of a stone hitting the glass feeds into the mechanism of glass fragility to result in the glass breaking.

Dispositions to Behave

LANGUAGE

‘The match is struck.’

antecedent of

Describes

WORLD

Figure 4.2

Event of the match being struck

‘If the match is struck it will ignite.’

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infer to

Describes

input to

Mechanism of match ignition

‘The match will ignite.’

Describes

results in

Event of the match igniting

Explanation of a match igniting

Input causes can form chains and networks. One input cause may cause an effect which itself is an input into another causal process. And so on. Framework causes do not generally form chains, since a framework cause is a very different sort of thing from its effect. If a framework cause causes some effect, that effect is not usually itself another framework cause.10 Consider the traditional example of causing a match to light by striking it. In this case the event of striking a match against a certain sort of surface is an input into the mechanism of ignition. The description of the cause satisfies part of the antecedent of the conditional statement that describes how the mechanism works. The conditional statement is the following: ‘If a match is struck then it will ignite.’ Other conditions, like the presence of oxygen, the dryness of the match, the lack of a hurricane in the immediate vicinity and so on can be included in the operational and interference conditions, but do not have to be included in the law that describes how the mechanism is working when it is working. The way it all fits together is shown in Figure 4.2.

IV Mental States as Input Causes or Framework Causes? Consider the following example. I went to the shop because I wanted an ice cream. Should my wanting an ice cream be regarded as an input cause of my going to the shop or should it be regarded as a framework cause? If it is taken to be an input cause, then we get the picture of a mechanism whose working results in my going to the shop and which is described by a law like this: whatever is the best way (or is believed to be the best way) to get what is wanted will be done. The mechanism is a mechanism of desire-fulfilment. My desire for an ice

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cream is an input into this mechanism, and the desire-fulfilling mechanism produces as an output the action of going to the shop. In go the mental states into the grinder; out come the actions. The mental states themselves are the outputs of other mental mechanisms. This picture is seductive. But when you examine it closely it is clearly a very strange picture indeed.11 The first thing to do in looking closely at this picture is to be very careful about talking about mental states. My wanting an ice cream is a state of me not my mind. I am in the state of wanting an ice cream; my mind is not in that state. The phrase ‘my mental state’ does not refer to a state of my mind; it refers to a state of me mentally. If my mental states were states of my mind (as opposed to my states of mind) then it might make sense to think of them as inputs into a mental mechanism resulting in other states of my mind and also actions. But it does not make sense to think of states of me as being inputs into such a mechanism. For, if my being in some state mentally goes into a mechanism, then I am going into that mechanism. The mechanism cannot be something within me; it must be something larger than me – something I go into. Suppose I am in prison. My state is a state of imprisonment. If this state is input into some mechanism, the mechanism must be something I can go into: for example, a judicial mechanism. By the same token, if my state mentally is input into some mechanism resulting in my acting, then this mechanism must be something I can go into. But the mechanism that my mental states are supposed to go into is my mind – something that is in me rather than something I can go into. It might be argued that states of me can be states within me, and so can be inputs into internal mechanisms. For example, my physical state might be that my stomach has an ulcer. Part of my state is the state of something within me. But this move cannot be made for mental states. For the only possible subject for such states is the whole person. My wanting an ice cream is not a fact about something less than me. My mind and my brain are both less than me in this sense, but my wanting an ice cream is not a state of either of them. They don’t want an ice cream. The transition from talking about people wanting things and believing things to talking about entities – beliefs and desires – existing within the people should be contested. It is a special case of the characteristic transition of cognitivism described at the start of Chapter 3. The transition is unexamined in most approaches to the philosophy of mind, and yet is at the heart of the issues discussed, for

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denying this transition is the beginning of behaviourism. Here is one way of spelling out the transition: I want an ice cream. I have a desire for an ice cream. There is a desire for an ice cream which I have. There is a desire for an ice cream within me.

Once the transition is made, the desire for the ice cream may be regarded as the sort of thing that might figure as a causal input (or output) in mechanisms within me. The fallacy in the transition is one of equivocation in the phrase ‘I have’. To see this, consider a more palpably absurd transition involving the same fallacy. I owe Jones money. I have a responsibility to pay Jones. There is a responsibility to pay Jones which I have. There is a responsibility to pay Jones within me.

Responsibilities are not things that one has in the sense that one has a kidney or a brain. No more are desires or indeed minds. Ryle pointed this out at the very start of The Concept of Mind. The official doctrine, which hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this. With the doubtful exception of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a mind. (1949: 11)

To think that you have a mind in the same sense that you have a brain or a body is to make a category mistake. You have a mind. You have a body. You have a responsibility to pay Jones. But this does not mean that you have three things – a mind, a body and a responsibility to pay Jones. That would be to make the same mistake as saying of the character in The Pickwick Papers that in coming home in a flood of tears and coming home in a sedan chair, she came home in two things – a flood of tears and a sedan chair. Talking of mental states as inputs into mental mechanisms is to make this category mistake. But this does not mean that we cannot talk of mental states as having a role in causal explanation. For they may be regarded not as inputs into a mechanism, but as providing the framework for such inputs. To say that I want an ice cream then is to describe me as embodying a certain sort of mechanism, one that takes as an input the state of the world with respect to the question of how to get hold of ice cream and produces goal-directed behaviour as an output.12 My wanting the ice cream causes that behaviour in the sense that the existence of gravity causes a stone to fall or the mechanism

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underlying photosynthesis causes the plant to produce oxygen. The existence of a mechanism should not be confused with an input to a mechanism even though both may be described as causes.13

Notes 1. See Armstrong (1968: Chapter 5), Fodor (1975: 2–9) and (1981: 5), and Putnam (1975: Chapter 16) for just a few of the many versions of this argument. 2. For example Putnam (1975: Chapter 16). 3. Mumford (1998: 21) describes Ryle’s approach to dispositions as empiricist, but his approach is much better described as pragmatist since it is concerned with an investigation of the norms that our use of mental concepts is governed by. 4. So I accept much of what Stephen Mumford (1998) says about the conceptual analysis of disposition statements without wanting to engage here with his ‘functionalist’ account that identifies dispositional properties with their categorical bases. 5. See e.g. Hempel (1965), though we can trace this approach back to Aristotle. 6. Fred Dretske (1988: 43) makes a similar but in fact different distinction between what he calls a structuring cause – the cause of C’s causing M – and the triggering cause – the cause of the C that causes M. 7. Another approach – a coherentist approach – requires of an explanation of some fact not the means to infer it from other facts but just the means to see how it hangs together with other facts. I am going to work with the stronger – inferentialist – conception of explanation without any further justification. Some people also argue that an explanation need only provide a way of inferring that the thing to be explained was likely to occur; but this debate about whether there is such a thing as probabilistic explanation can be ignored at this stage. 8. It is also endorsed by Nancy Cartwright (1989). U. T. Place, although he is associated with the materialist identity theory of the mind, was in fact an avowed behaviourist concerning states of mind. 9. C. B. Martin’s (1994) example of the electrofink interfering with the process of a current flowing down a conductive wire serves exactly the same purpose as this example. And David Lewis’ (1997) response to it is similar to my own response. 10. According to functionalism, a mental state is a state that fills a certain role in a causal network. This makes it clear that functionalism takes mental states to be input causes not framework causes. 11. It is a picture that Helen Steward (1997) has criticised as the ‘Network Model of Causation’. She blames it for the temptation philosophers of mind have felt to identify mental states with brain states.

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12. Of course, this is too simple an account of what it is to want something. But the purpose at this stage is just to treat the causal issue. 13. Seeing the role of a special kind of causal mechanism rather than merely a special kind of causal input in the causal explanation of action can solve a lot of problems in the philosophy of action. Harry Frankfurt (1969 and 1978) has argued that the issue of responsibility for action and the technical problem of deviant causal chains are both resolved this way. See also John Fischer and Mark Ravizza (1998). I have argued for this in various places myself (Stout 2002 and 2005: Chapter 6). Peter Machamer et al. (2000) make a useful case for talking about mechanisms when causally explaining things in science generally.

5

Ways of Behaving

I Introduction I argued in the previous chapter that a disposition to behave in a certain way is a real state of an organism or person which entitles one to make inferences about its behaviour. These inferences are characterised by conditional statements or laws. The disposition amounts to the embodiment by that organism or person of a mechanism whose working is described by that law. The law need not be universally true, but describes what results in certain specified circumstances when the disposition is operational and not interfered with. I also argued that mental states should be identified with these dispositional states rather than with inputs to them. The task now is to say something about the laws that characterise the behavioural dispositions that constitute mental states. On the view that I am defending a genuine agent is ipso facto a subject with mental states. So by understanding agency and in particular how an agent’s behaviour is causally explained, we will understand behavioural dispositions and hence the nature of the agent’s mental states. The central claim of this chapter is that practical rationality is essential to agency. I start with the claim that action is essentially goal-directed and develop the claim that action is essentially normgoverned. By employing the distinction between framework causes and input causes established in the previous chapter, I can show that it is the framework cause of behaviour that must be characterised in terms of goals and in terms of norms. This means that behavioural dispositions – the dispositions that are to be identified with mental states in my approach – must be characterised in terms of goals and norms. In particular we can say that what it is to be an agent and hence a subject of mental states is to be disposed to behave in a way that is sensitive to goals and norms – and hence to practical rationality, as I will employ the term.

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II Internalist and Externalist Models of Teleological Explanation Aristotle and Kant are not usually associated with behaviourism. But their work on teleological explanation and explanation by reasons is central to the sort of theory that I want to advocate.1 Teleological explanation is explanation of something in terms of what it is for the sake of. It is explanation in terms of goals. If you explain someone’s turning a door handle by saying that the person did it in order to open the door, you are explaining his or her behaviour teleologically. Similarly, if you explain the existence of a ramp leading up to a shop door by saying that it is there to enable wheelchair users to gain access to the shop, you are explaining the existence of the ramp teleologically. Now one thing that characterises action is that it is goal-directed. Actions admit of teleological explanation. An exception to this claim would be an action that is itself the achievement of a top-level goal. If your answer to the question, ‘Why did you climb Mount Everest?’ is ‘Because it was there,’ this suggests that you do not have a further goal that you can explain your action by. Of course it is still the case that the other things you did up to but not including climbing Mount Everest can be teleologically explained in terms of the goal of climbing Mount Everest. So the action of climbing Mount Everest has an internal structure of goal-directedness, even if it itself is not goal-directed. So, leaving room for possible qualifications, we can say that action is essentially goal-directed. And this means it is explainable teleologically. The crucial issue now for my purposes is whether we must have an internalist model or an externalist model of teleological explanation. Internalists have argued that in order to explain something in terms of a goal, you must first be able to attribute a representation of the goal to the thing whose behaviour is being explained. Externalists have argued that you can explain something in terms of a goal without first being able to attribute any representation of that goal. Then you can attribute the intention or the desire to achieve that goal in virtue of this.2 Aristotle introduced the idea of teleological causation in contrast to three other types of causation: material, formal and efficient. For our purposes the crucial contrast is between the teleological cause and the efficient cause. Roughly speaking, an efficient cause is something happening that makes something else happen. An efficient cause of a

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house being built is a builder building it. An efficient cause of the sky going dark during an eclipse is the moon passing between the sun and the earth. Efficient causation is what most philosophers since Descartes have taken to be the only reputable form of causation. Indeed, the sort of thing that modern treatments of causation usually take to be a cause is a rather special case of an efficient cause; it is an input cause in the sense introduced in the previous chapter. Builders and their process of building (or perhaps their state at the start of that process) would both be regarded by Aristotle as efficient causes of the house being built. But modern treatments of causation only allow states and events that are inputs to the building process to count as efficient causes. Current discussion of causation is almost entirely about one event causing another. A teleological explanation on the other hand cites the goal for the sake of which something happens or something is done. Again, in the sense of end or that for the sake of which a thing is done, e.g. walking about is done for the sake of health. (‘Why is he walking about?’ We say: ‘To be healthy’, and having said that, we think we have assigned the cause.) (Aristotle, The Physics: 194b32–35)

The teleological explanation of the builder’s activity of putting one brick on top of another cites the goal of the house being built. The teleological explanation of the baby’s crying cites the baby being fed. If teleological explanation is explanation in terms of goals then this suggests that teleological causes are themselves goals. But this means that teleological causes follow the things they are causing. Does this mean that in teleological causation something can cause something else to happen before it happens – i.e. backwards causation? If you put the being fed before the crying or the house before the bricklaying you seem to be getting the direction of causation the wrong way round. Ignoring the possibility that in quantum mechanics there may be some limited scope for backward causation, we can assume that there is no possibility of a mechanism working that takes as an input something that happens after the thing that results from the working of the mechanism. If we think of a teleological cause as a cause in the sense of being an event that makes another event happen or as an input into a mechanism whose working results in an effect, then we cannot take teleological causes to be events that follow from the things being explained. And this means that after all we cannot take them to be the goals of the things being explained.

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So philosophers who have thought of teleological causes on the model of efficient input causes have generally avoided backward causation by internalising the goal. According to this move the real teleological cause of the builder’s activity is not the house being built but is the builder’s intention to build the house – a psychological state of the builder. It is taken to be a state or event inside the builder that precedes the activity of building. As such, the goal may be thought of as an event prior to the effect, and an input into the process that is the process of putting intentions into action. This interpretation of teleological causation eliminates full-blooded teleological causes. For, on this view, we do not explain some activity in terms of what it is for the sake of. We explain it in terms of some belief about what it is for the sake of or some intention or desire for what it is for the sake of. This is what Andrew Woodfield (1976) calls an internalist model of teleological explanation. This model compromises the principle that action is essentially goal-directed. For, in this model goals do not figure in the explanation of action; what figure are representations of goals. And that is something quite different. One way to reject this model is to deny that teleological explanation is causal at all. But this is not the only way to deny that the teleological cause is an input into a mechanism. An alternative (externalist) model of teleological explanation involves the goal of the house being built as an aspect of the framework rather than as being internalised in an input into it. The way the house-building mechanism works may be described by the teleological causal law that says roughly: whatever is the way to achieve the goal of the house being built will happen. The fact that a certain activity is the way to get the house built goes towards satisfying the antecedent of this law and explains the fact that such activity occurs. According to the first – internalist – model (see Figure 5.1), the appropriate mechanism is one for responding to your psychological state, and the ‘teleological’ cause is a psychological state. According to the second – externalist – model, the appropriate mechanism is one for doing what is required to get a house built, and the teleological cause is the fact that putting one brick on top on another is what is required to get a house built. The goal of the house being built is implicit in the mechanism of acting. Another way to put this given the model of causal dispositions developed in the previous chapter is that the builder is disposed to do what is required to get a house built. In the first model, the goal of the house being built figures only as part of the content of the psychological state that is taken to be the

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The Inner Life of a Rational Agent Internalist model

Inputs

Framework

The builder’s having as his or her goal the building of a house and the belief that putting one brick on top of another is the way to achieve that goal.

The mechanism that results in the behaviour that is believed to yield the builder’s goals.

Externalist Model Inputs

Framework

The fact that putting one brick on top of another is the way to achieve the goal of having a house built.

The mechanism that results in whatever is the way to achieve the goal of having a house built.

Figure 5.1

Two models of teleological explanation

teleological cause. It does not figure in the description of the mechanism or the behavioural disposition. So according to the first model, action is not really the working of a teleological mechanism. It is a process that has as inputs states of affairs that may be described using teleological language; but that is not the same thing. In the first model the agent’s behavioural disposition is a disposition to do whatever is believed by the agent to satisfy the agent’s intentions. It is a disposition to respond to the agent’s psychological states. In the second model the agent’s disposition is a disposition to do what is required in order to achieve some goal. It is a goal-directed disposition. What has externalism to do with behaviourism? The answer is that if you can explain the builder’s activity of putting one brick on top of another using the second – externalist – model, then you can attribute a goal to the builder in virtue of how he or she behaves. This is the beginning of a behaviourist account. To say that in putting one brick on top of another the builder’s goal was to have a built house is to say something about his or her state of mind. On the internalist model, you can only explain the builder’s activity teleologically if you can already attribute the internalised goal – the intention – to him or her. On the externalist model, you can explain the builder’s activity teleologically by showing what is required to get a house built and showing how the builder’s activity fits into a

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teleological mechanism or disposition which can be described using the law: whatever (within some limited range) is required to get the house built will be done. Knowing that such a mechanism is present is knowing how the builder is disposed to behave. In virtue of this knowledge you can attribute the intention to the builder. This is how the second model ties in with behaviourism. Developing this idea is the project for the rest of the book. Equally you can attribute a belief to the builder – namely the belief that putting one brick on top of another is the way to build a house. It is interesting that the nineteenth-century psychologist Alexander Bain, whose general view of the mind was far from behaviourist, did have just this sort of behaviourist conception of belief. It will readily be admitted that the state of mind called Belief is, in many cases, a concomitant of our activity. But I mean to go farther than this, and to affirm that belief has no meaning, except in reference to our actions . . . Whenever any creature is found performing an action, indifferent in itself, with a view to some end, and adhering to that action with the same energy that would be manifested under the actual promotion of the end, we say that the animal possesses confidence, or belief, in the sequence of the two different things, or in a certain arrangement of nature, whereby one phenomenon succeeds another. (Bain 1859: 568–9)

Charles Taylor (1964) developed an influential externalist approach to teleological explanation according to which goals may be attributed in virtue of the way the system behaves. Taylor’s account is this: To offer a teleological explanation of some event or class of events, e.g., the behaviour of some being, is, then, to account for it by laws in terms of which an event’s occurring is held to be dependent on that event’s being required for some end. To say that the behaviour of a given system should be explained in terms of purpose, then, is, in part, to make an assertion about the form of laws, or the type of laws which hold of the system. (Taylor 1964: 9)

So Taylor is clear that teleological explanation is not about the inputs into a causal mechanism but about the mechanism itself – not about the facts that satisfy the antecedents of a causal law but about the causal law itself. And the law has the form: if x is the behaviour required for E, then x will occur. But Taylor goes on to say the following: Something more than teleological explanation is required for us to use the notion of action, and, it follows of course, the notion of desire as well. And this something more is, as we have seen, that we be able to identify

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The Inner Life of a Rational Agent the ‘direction’ of an action, i.e., what kind of action it is, independently of its antecedent conditions or the laws by which it is explained. (Taylor 1964: 55)

This extra component turns out to depend on the way the agents describe the goal to themselves.3 In addition to being goal-directed, the behaviour of an agent must have a description which is in some way the description the action has for the agent. Taylor’s argument is that mere movements may be explained teleologically, but actions are more than mere movements. They are more than mere movements inasmuch as they involve the idea of a mover as well as a movement, and what this requires is that the mover be a locus of responsibility who represents the goals as well as being directed towards them. This move effectively rules out a behaviourist interpretation of Taylor’s account.4 Behaviourism is not ruled out simply because Taylor requires that conscious description of the goal is a necessary part of human agency. The kind of behaviourist that I am trying to describe in this book is happy with the idea that conscious representations are an essential aspect of human agency. This sort of behaviourism is captured by the thought that having conscious representations follows from being a genuine agent. Taylor’s position rules out behaviourism by claiming instead that this conscious description of the goal is an extra component, in addition to a properly sophisticated teleological explanation. The kind of behaviourist I am trying to describe denies that consciousness is an extra component to properly sophisticated teleological explanation. That a system has consciousness is identified by this sort of behaviourist with the fact that the system’s behaviour is explainable by a special kind of teleological explanation. But for Taylor, that a system has consciousness depends on its behaviour having some special extra quality in addition to being teleologically explained. The distinction, although it is subtle, is absolutely crucial. Larry Wright develops an account of teleological explanation along the same lines as Taylor, modifying Taylor’s formula as follows: S does B for the sake of G iff: (i) B tends to bring about G. (ii) B occurs because (i.e., is brought about by the fact that) it tends to bring about G. (Wright 1976: 39)

Wright has changed the condition that the teleologically explained behaviour must be required for the goal, and substituted the condition

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that the teleologically explained behaviour must tend to bring about the goal. In section IV I will consider whether either formulation of this condition is quite right. But Wright’s account generally is more amenable to a behaviourist interpretation since he does not require as an extra component of human agency any sort of internal representation. According to Wright, consciousness is attributed to something when the teleological explanations of its activity have a certain complexity: Mental terms are forced on us only as a way of characterising in an intelligible way the incredible complexity of the (largely teleological) dispositional state of affairs that manifests itself in typical human behaviour. (Wright 1976: 144)

While rather vague, this suggestion looks like the beginning of a behaviourist account.

III Why aren’t all Dispositions Trivially Teleological? Internalist responses to Taylor and Wright in the 1970s and 1980s very often made the objection that every system whether teleological or not trivially satisfies Taylor’s and Wright’s conditions for teleology. Andrew Woodfield (1976) presented the following version of this objection.5 Take a U-shaped tube with water in it. After a disturbance the level of water in one arm will move until the levels are equalised. If the way to equalise the levels is for the level to rise by 1 cm then it will rise by 1 cm. And if the way to equalise the levels is for the level to drop by 2 cm it will drop by 2 cm. In general it will do whatever is required to equalise the levels. By the same token it will do what tends to equalise the levels or what is best to equalise the levels. Yet we do not want to say that the behaviour of the water in that arm of the U-shaped tube is teleological or goal-directed. An even simpler example would be that of a stone accelerating to earth. The stone behaves in the way to achieve the goal of accelerating to earth at 10 ms2: Just accelerating to earth at this rate is the best way to achieve this goal. And this is what it always does. This move can be made for any law-governed activity. The system will do what is required or best to bring about the goal of the law being satisfied – namely by satisfying the law. If you specify the goal of a system as that of following the laws of nature then by following those laws it does what it should do to achieve its goal. According to the internalist approach to teleological explanation, what is lacking in these examples is any internal representation of the

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goal driving these processes. Without that internal teleological drive no satisfaction of merely external conditions could be sufficient for the behaviour to count as teleological. But I am arguing that the teleological law is not to be taken merely as an external condition that behaviour that counts as teleological must satisfy. It should be taken to be a way of describing the mechanism that results in behaviour that counts as teleological. With this in mind the counterexamples to externalism that I have just sketched are not so clear. We can start with the principle that a legitimate way to characterise the working of a mechanism should involve no redundancy. The teleological description of the law of gravity is equivalent to the nonteleological description. So the teleological part of the description is redundant and fails to characterise how the mechanism of gravitation works. This means that the mechanism is not properly teleological. In the example of the U-shaped tube we might think that the teleological description is not in fact equivalent to the non-teleological description. But by this very token the teleological law does not really describe how the mechanism of level-equalisation works. Suppose the air pressure is higher at one end of the tube than at the other. In this case the best way to equalise the levels might be for the water in the right arm of the tube to get heavier; but it won’t do this. Of course there is no requirement that a mechanism work in every circumstance. And we might say that this pressure differential is a situation in which the teleological level-equalisation mechanism does not work. It could be excluded by including in the operational conditions of the mechanism that no such pressure differential exists. But if all the situations where the teleological description would produce a different recommendation from the non-teleological description were simply excluded in this way then again the teleological part of the description of the mechanism would be quite redundant. And according to the principle that the description of how a mechanism works should not involve redundancy, it can be ruled out as illegitimate. These counterexamples and responses to them ramify in the literature, and I do not want to get involved in the detail here. But I want to stress the general point that we should think of teleology as being a feature of causal frameworks not of causal inputs into frameworks. In other words the behaviour of a system is teleological if the causal mechanism resulting in that behaviour must be described in a teleological way. This means that we can then consider what are and are not legitimate ways to describe mechanisms and apply this to the question of whether a particular system is correctly described as teleological.

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IV The Need for Norms One crucial aspect of Aristotle’s account of teleology, one that does not appear in either Taylor’s or Wright’s accounts, is the role of normativity. For Aristotle, the goal that figures in a teleological explanation is not just any old state of affairs that things happen for the sake of. The goal state is a good state. It is the state of affairs that should be achieved given the nature of the thing in question. Not only that but the means is not just any old cause of the goal; the means is something that is good for the goal. So the means to an end is the right way to achieve what should happen. Normativity is involved twice, both for the means and for the end. But is it possible to do without normative language when providing a teleological explanation? Taylor seems to do without it by describing the means not as the best way or right way to achieve the end, but just as what is required to achieve the end. Suppose that the end is to have a brick house and suppose also that putting one brick on top of another is a causal requirement for achieving this end. That it is a causal requirement is in no sense a normative fact. And this suggests that it may be possible to explain putting one brick on top of another in terms of the goal of building a house without recourse to normative language. But there are some serious problems with this. First of all, putting one brick on top of another is not really the only way to get a brick house built. The builder might connect the bricks together on their sides and then lift the wall from horizontal to vertical. The builder might start with the top brick held in place from above and put one brick under the other. Or the builder might just tell someone else to build the house and not touch a brick him- or herself. There is almost always going to be a variety of more or less sensible ways to achieve a goal. This is even clearer in other cases. If I go for a walk for the sake of my health it does not follow that going for a walk is somehow required for my health. There are any number of alternative methods. This is why Wright in his account of teleological explanation does not identify the means to an end with whatever is required for achievement of that end. He describes the means as something that tends to bring about the end. Since there will usually be many things that tend to bring about the same end, Wright (1976: 36–7) allows that teleologically explaining something as a means to an end does not show why that thing, as opposed to something else that tends to the same end, happens.

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I think that this move restricts the usefulness of teleological explanation unnecessarily . I think we can explain why the builder puts one brick on top of another as opposed to putting one brick underneath the other in terms of the fitness of this behaviour to achieve the goal of building a house. But we can only explain this by introducing a stronger notion than Wright’s ‘tends to bring about’. We have to say that the behaviour is appropriate for bringing about the end or is the right way or the best way to bring about the end. And these are normative notions.6 The point is that there may be no one course of behaviour that is actually required to achieve the goal. There may be several ways of getting there. To explain why one course was adopted rather than any other one must appeal to something other than the simple causal facts. One must appeal to one course being better than the others. The process that results in behaviour that is directed to some goal is not merely sensitive to what is required to achieve that goal or what ends to bring about that goal. It is sensitive to how best to bring about that goal.7 Sometimes, of course, you cannot explain why one course of action was adopted over another, when for example the two courses of action are equally good. The process that results in one of these courses may still be sensitive to how best to bring about some goal. For in such cases what is the best way must be characterised disjunctively – as this or that or the other. Another reason that teleological explanation of behaviour must be characterised normatively is that in the circumstances there may be no way to achieve the goal, in which case another goal should be achieved. There is no way to characterise a function for changing goals in these circumstances except by appealing to the fact that the alternative goal is the appropriate or right one to achieve in the circumstances. Teleological processes do not merely result in appropriate ways of achieving fixed goals; they result in appropriate ways of achieving appropriate goals. Goal selection is part of the process. Decision theorists (or rational choice theorists), following the pioneering work of Frank Ramsey ([1926] 1978), have argued that they have a non-normative principle for both means and ends selection using preference functions. According to decision theory, you can work out an ordering for your possible goals by looking at all the pairs of possible outcomes and asking yourself which outcome in each pair you would prefer. And then if you know the probabilities of achieving each of these goals given the various means available you can work

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out the course of action that maximises your expected utility. This calculation may be expressed without using any normative terms. But when you look more closely you can see that decision theory does not furnish a way to specify the teleological explanation of behaviour non-normatively. First of all the goals of human action are not in practice selected by consulting preferences. On the contrary, preferences are themselves determined by what you decide should be achieved, and are not generally given to you as basic facts that you can then use to determine what should be achieved. Utility maximisation cannot count as a person’s one and only goal, because what counts as contributing to your utility is itself determined by your goals. One way to see that preferences are not given to you in advance of your determining your goals is by seeing that there are indefinitely many different ways to specify the ‘possibility space’. I can describe the world as containing a certain set of possible outcomes, and work out preferences between these outcomes. But then I can redescribe the same world in quite different terms, which reveal a different set of possible outcomes with different preferences. Preferences depend on how the agent conceptualises his or her world of possibilities. For example, I might face what seems to be a moral dilemma between two unattractive outcomes – betraying my friend to the authorities while telling the truth or protecting my friend while lying to the authorities. But rather than simply picking one of these alternatives, I might usefully reconceptualise my possibility space and choose between these alternatives and a third – that of telling my friend that I am not going to lie to the authorities on his behalf and that he will have to take responsibility for the situation himself. And so it goes on. For any description of a set of possibilities it is always possible to redescribe the possibilities to present a different set of choices. Only given an implicit conception of what is right and wrong can we make sense of a claim that some course of behaviour is the way to achieve some goal – that it is the right way to achieve the right goal. This conception of right and wrong does not have to be taken to be the one and only conception or even a particularly moral conception. But just using causal notions unbuttressed by any such conception will not yield any viable form of teleological law. Introducing normative vocabulary into the description of the sorts of teleological processes that result in behaviour would have been anathema to the positivistically minded psychological behaviourists who objected to any kind of teleological talk in any case. It does not seem properly scientific to talk of people acting well – that their

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behaviour is the right behaviour to achieve the goals they should be pursuing. Even if scientific facts are not limited to the verifiable observations of scientific instruments, most scientists will want to maintain a fact/value distinction according to which values form no part of scientific discourse. But, if this is right, and science cannot be stretched to include evaluative descriptions in its discourse, then what follows is that a science of behaviour is not going to be the best way to explain behaviour. Psychology will have to defer to something else – perhaps literature. This is because teleological explanation is irreducibly normative. We cannot make sense of something being the means to an end except as being the right way to achieve an end. And we cannot even specify the goal state of a piece of behaviour except by reference to some normative system, some rule-governed practice, which defines that goal.

V Norm-governed Behaviour What this suggests is that goal-directed behaviour is also as a matter of necessity norm-governed behaviour. To say that something happens because it is the way to achieve some goal is a special case of the more general claim that it happens because it is right according to some system of norms. So, if behavioural dispositions are essentially teleological this means that they are essentially normative. This brings us to Kant’s conception of acting according to the idea of rules. For Kant, our free agency is to be explained as the causal role of reason. ‘Will is a kind of causality of living beings in so far as they are rational’ (Groundwork: 97). And our rationality is captured in the fact that our behaviour is governed by norms or rules. The rules themselves are up to us – they are of our own making; this is what it is to be free autonomous agents. But our behaviour must conform to these rules for it to be properly rational and thus free behaviour. As with the case of goal-directed behaviour there is an internalist and an externalist way of construing the idea of norm-governed behaviour. We might think of behaviour as being responsive to the agent’s internal representations of norms or we might think of behaviour as being sensitive to actual norms. The latter model involves the exciting idea that in the case of human agency norms enter into causal processes. But this idea has seemed just a bit too exciting to many philosophers of action, who fall back on the internalist model instead. One objection to the externalist model in which human behaviour is genuinely norm-governed is the same as the objection considered in

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section III to the view of human behaviour as genuinely goal-directed. This is that in some sense at least the most mindless behaviour of inanimate objects trivially counts as norm-governed. If this is the case, then characterising human behaviour as norm-governed does not distinguish it from the mindless behaviour of a stone as it falls down a cliff side. Contrast my behaviour in going to the shop to buy some milk and a stone’s behaviour in falling down a cliff. A stone’s falling operates according to the gravitational rule: ‘the acceleration should be equal to the mass of the earth divided by the square of its radius times the gravitational constant’. In going to the shop to buy some milk I operate according to the rule: ‘if we have run out of milk, I should go to the shop and buy some’. This rule is what makes the fact that we have run out of milk count as a reason for going to the shop; it is a rule of rationality. Just as my behaviour is governed by the rule: ‘if we have run out of milk, I should go to the shop and buy some’, so the stone’s behaviour is governed by the Inverse Square Law. But clearly there is a huge difference between the way my behaviour is governed by rules and reasons and the way the stone’s behaviour is governed by rules and reasons. What is the basis of this difference? Kant was aware of this challenge, and his reply was that I act according to the idea of that rule, whereas the stone does not act according to the idea of the gravitational rule. ‘Everything in nature works according to rules. Only a rational being has the power to act according to the idea of rules’ (Groundwork: 36). But it is not completely clear what Kant must have meant by ‘the idea of rules’. Almost all commentators take the idea of rules to be the agent’s own representation of the rules. As Gibbard (1990) puts it, agents act according to the psychological state that is their acceptance of a certain rule or reason. According to this interpretation of Kant, in the case of rational agents, reasons are internalised in the form of attitudes. Rational action is the causal response to these internalised reasons. And these internal reasons act as efficient causes. This is exactly parallel to the internalist model of teleological (goaldirected) explanation (see Figure 5.2). I think that this internalising strategy gives us a distorted conception of the causal process that constitutes action. It fails to take seriously the idea of action as a process of transforming the world in the light of reasons. Instead, the transformations that characterise the rationality of agency are taken to consist in the production of mental ideas or

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Beliefs and Desires

Input

Process of Reason

Output

Attitude of accepting that I should do X Input Process of Action Output I do X

Figure 5.2

The internalist model of norm-governed behaviour

attitudes. The move from these attitudes to the transformation of the world outside comes after. So first you have reasons doing their stuff in producing attitudes; then you have a further causal response to these reasons. The transformation of the world is not taken to be a manifestation of reasons in action, but rather a response to such a manifestation. Action is then regarded as a two-stage process. It involves the rational production of intentions and other attitudes; then it involves the merely causal response to these attitudes. But there is another way to respond to Kant’s problem without taking norm-governed behaviour to be behaviour that is governed by internal representations of norms. This is to deny that the stone is really disposed to behave in a way that must be characterised normatively. That aspect of the characterisation of the stone’s behaviour that involves rightness and wrongness is entirely redundant. To begin with we must be very careful to distinguish being subject to norms and being sensitive to norms. When rational agents follow some norm or rule, their behaviour is not subject to that norm or rule; it is sensitive to it. Just by clarifying what sensitivity as opposed to subjection to norms consists in we may be able to explain the difference between rational agency and the behaviour of a stone. My suggestion, using the model of causation derived in the last chapter, is this. Suppose the activity of an object results from a mechanism whose working is described by a rule, R, which involves nonredundantly a variable, V. So R says something like: if the value of V is such and such then the object should do X, but if the value of V is

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such and such else then the object should do Y. Then we can say that the activity of the object is subject to rule R. We can equally say that it is governed by R. At the same time we can say that it is sensitive to V. Consider again the distinction between the stone acting according to a rule and a rational agent acting according to a rule. The stone in behaving as it does is sensitive to its distance from the centre of the earth.8 If the distance were different the stone would behave differently accordingly. But the behaviour of the stone is not sensitive to the gravitational rule itself. If the gravitational rule changed and directed the stone to behave differently, the stone would not adapt. Rational agents on the other hand have the capacity not only to be sensitive in their behaviour to the features of the world that rules describe, but also sensitive to the rules themselves. If the rule for how to deal with the lack of milk changed to: ‘if we have run out of milk, I should drink black coffee’, then my behaviour would indeed change, assuming that it was properly rational. The crucial thing about this picture is that rules and reasons are taken to be (at least partly) external to and independent of the behaviour of the agent. Rational agents are able not only to discern features in the environment, but can also discern what the rules tell them should happen in such a situation. If the rules change, the behaviour of rational agents change. There is no such sensitivity in the behaviour of non-rational things. This means that rational agents can go wrong in a way that non-rational agents cannot. In addition to failing to be sensitive to the reasons – i.e. the conditions in the world specified by the rule – rational agents can fail to be sensitive to the rule itself. On this view, the behaviour of rational agents is still subject to rules of nature. Rational agents are still psychologically compelled – in accordance with second-order rules. But the subjection to the secondorder rule – whatever the first-order rule says should happen should happen – is not a separate process – something that comes after the real work of rational agency. It is the whole process under another aspect. Subjection to the second-order rule just is sensitivity to first-order rules. Sensitivity to reasons just is subjection to law, when that law is a second-order one, making reference itself to rules. This makes some sense of the distinction between working according to rules and acting according to the idea of rules. As with the internalist model, acting according to the idea of rules is having one’s behaviour causally determined at one stage removed from the rules. But this is not to be understood as having one’s behaviour causally determined by something else that is the true rational response to the

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rules – for example, the attitude of accepting the rules. Instead, it is to be understood as being causally determined by a second-order rule that demands sensitivity to the first-order rules. The first-order rules determine behaviour through the idea of them in the second-order rules. The idea of rules is taken here not to be the representation of the rules in the mind of the agent but rather the representation of the rules that figures in the second order rule that the agent’s behaviour is subject to. I think that this is the right way to make sense of Kant’s conception of reverence or respect for the moral law (introduced in the Groundwork and developed in Chapter 3 of Book 1 of the Critique of Practical Reason). Kant regards this attitude of acknowledging the subordination of one’s will to the law as essential to truly rational activity. But he explicitly denies that reverence for the moral law mediates our moral agency. It is not a component in the process of acting rationally. Immediate determination of the will by the law and consciousness of this determination is called ‘reverence’, so that reverence is regarded as the effect of the law on the subject and not as the cause of the law. (Groundwork: 16)

Doing what the law says because it is the law counts in ordinary language as reverence for the law or respect for the law. Doing what the law says because it is the law is simply being sensitive in one’s behaviour to what the law is and, by the same token, being subject in one’s behaviour to the second-order rule: what the law says should happen should happen. The attitude of respect for the law does not have to be conceived as an independent input in rule-governed activity. Instead, having that attitude just is behaving in a way that is sensitive to the law and subject to the second-order rule. The attitude of respect for the law does not have explanatory priority over rational agency. Once we have a conception of rational agency as subjection to second-order rules, we can attribute the attitude of respect as a necessary consequence of this rational agency. For Kant, respect for the moral law is a feeling that can be attributed to moral agents a priori (Critique of Practical Reason: 73). The attitude of accepting norms is indeed necessary to rational agency, not as a mediating component but rather as a consequence. This is a behaviourist conception of the attitude of accepting a rule. To accept a rule R is to be disposed to behave in a way that is described by the (second-order) rule: ‘Do what R says you should do.’

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I should do X given the rules R

Figure 5.3

Input

Process of doing what rules R say I should do

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Output I do X

The Externalist model of norm-governed behaviour

The externalist model of norm-governed behaviour makes room for this conception (see Figure 5.3). Because the attitude of accepting a rule does not figure as an input into the process of acting (as it does in the internalist model) then we can fully describe the process of action without making any reference to this attitude. Given this, we can attribute the attitude in virtue of describing the process of action. Moral philosophers more recently have picked up this Kantian idea and have argued that moral and prudential motivation may logically precede desire rather than being dependent on it. Whenever we do something for a reason we want to do it. A Humean might think that it followed that wanting or desiring to do an action must always figure as one of the reasons for doing it. Thomas Nagel and John McDowell have argued against this Humean conclusion, saying that we can always ascribe a desire to do the action when someone acts for a reason because ascribing that desire depends on being able to explain his or her action that way. Therefore it may be admitted as trivial that, for example, considerations about my future welfare or about the interests of others cannot motivate me to act without a desire being present at the time of action. That I have the appropriate desire simply follows from the fact that these considerations motivate me; if the likelihood that an act will promote my future happiness motivates me to perform it now, then it is appropriate to ascribe to me a desire for my own future happiness. But nothing follows about the role of the desire as a condition contributing to the motivational efficacy of those considerations. It is a necessary condition of their efficacy to be sure, but only a logically necessary condition. It is not necessary either as a contributing influence, or as a causal condition. (Nagel 1970: 29–30) The commitment to ascribe such a desire is simply consequential on our taking him to act as he does for the reason we cite; the desire does not function as an extra component in a full specification of his reason. (McDowell 1998: 79)

Both philosophers are making what I described in Chapter 1 as pragmatic claims – about entitlements or commitments to ascribe a desire.

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They are making claims about the order of dependency between ascriptions of desire and explanations of action. In both cases the entitlement or commitment to ascribe a desire is taken to depend on the entitlement/commitment to explain behaviour in terms of relevant considerations. Roughly speaking we have two statements here: Statement 1: I desire my future welfare. Statement 2: I am motivated in my behaviour by consideration of my future welfare.

The traditional empiricist theory of action has it that one is entitled to make the second statement in virtue of being entitled to make the first. My right to say that I am motivated by considerations of my future happiness depends on my right to attribute to myself the desire for my future happiness. Nagel and McDowell, following Kant’s lead on reverence, turn this upside down. They say that my right to attribute the desire for my future happiness to myself depends on my having the right to claim that I am motivated by considerations of my future happiness. Desires may be attributed in virtue of describing behaviour as governed by certain norms rather than the other way around. Nagel and McDowell do not apply this principle to other psychological attitudes, and they would not count themselves as behaviourists. But here we have the basis for a thoroughgoing behaviourism. Being able to describe someone’s behaviour as rational in a certain way may be the basis for attributing a state of mind to that person. This sort of behaviourism would not have suited the positivistic ambitions of early psychological behaviourists since there is no guaranteed way to verify descriptions of someone’s behaviour as rational in a certain way. It is a sort of normative behaviourism.

VI Conclusion I argued in section II that a person’s behaviour is explained by describing the mechanism or disposition that is the framework cause of that person’s behaviour in teleological terms. This means, rather loosely, that the person is disposed to do whatever is the means to some specified end. If we are in a position to attribute this teleological disposition to them and explain their behaviour correspondingly, we are thereby in a position to attribute a goal and therefore an intention to them.

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So, behavioural dispositions are teleological dispositions. I then argued that such teleological dispositions must be characterised in normative terms. They are dispositions to do the right thing to achieve the right goal, according to some conception of what constitutes rightness. Goal-directed behavioural dispositions are at the same time norm-governed dispositions. This does not mean that behavioural dispositions are dispositions to respond to a person’s internal representations of what is right. Realising such a disposition would not be a case of transforming the world in the light of reasons. It would be to transform the world in response to an internal representation of reasons, which is a very different matter. Instead, we should understand the idea of being disposed to behave in a norm-governed way as being disposed to do what the rules of practical rationality dictate. It is to be disposed to be sensitive to practical rationality. So, mental states, the framework causes of human behaviour, are dispositions to behave in ways that are sensitive to practical rationality. This idea is bound to sound quite strange and difficult to begin with. But in the next chapter I try to clarify and develop it. In particular I try to explain this phrase ‘the rules of practical rationality’.

Notes 1. Aristotle is also a key source for Rachlin’s version of psychological behaviourism, which he calls teleological behaviourism. See Rachlin (1994) for a concerted effort to bring Aristotle into the behaviourist fold. 2. See Woodfield (1976) for a treatment of this debate. Woodfield argues for the internalist conception of teleological explanation. 3. Velleman (2000) also requires self-knowledge as a condition of real agency. 4. Taylor’s whole book is an attack on what he calls behaviourism, but his target is Watson’s stimulus-response behaviourism, and the sort of teleological psychological behaviourism propounded by e.g. Rachlin (1994) would be untouched by his attack. 5. See also Sprigge (1971). 6. Wright does talk of appropriateness (1976: 38), but this normative talk does not get into his official formulation. 7. Note of course that such sensitivity does not mean that the process will get it right every time. Things may interfere with the process. Also, as I will try to explain at the beginning of the next chapter, the idea of the right way must be understood to be relative to a version of practical rationality. This

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allows a highly irrational way of behaving still to count as aiming at the right way. 8. This is already to use the word ‘sensitive’ in a slightly peculiar way, since the stone, lacking sensory apparatus, is paradigmatically insensitive. But I think we are able to extend the use of the word ‘sensitive’ in this way.

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Rationality and Interpretation

I The Structure of Practical Rationality A way of behaving is a way to behave. It is a system of deriving recommendations of the form: ‘Such-and-such is the thing to do,’ from descriptions of the circumstances. So a way of behaving must be characterised normatively. For example, one of the rules characterising someone’s way of behaving might be: ‘If you are in a supermarket doing the shopping and you need milk then the thing to do is to pick a carton of milk from the shelf.’ An input into such a system might be the fact that you are in a supermarket doing the shopping and needing milk, and the output would be the recommendation that picking a carton of milk from the shelf is the thing to do. This looks like a rather illiberal conception of a way of behaving. It might be argued that a way of behaving should be characterised instead by recommendations of the form: ‘Such-and-such is a thing that may be done.’ For example, when choosing a carton of milk in a shop and faced with fifty similar cartons, the recommendation might be: ‘You may pick a carton which is third from the left in the shelf.’ Anthony Kenny has defended something like this idea, arguing that a system of practical recommendations characterising a way of behaving should be thought of as providing several alternative (and incompatible) recommendations in any situation.1 He argues that in a particular kind of situation there may be more than one response recommended, and that a way of behaving may be indifferent between these different responses. But not every recommendation characterising a way to behave need itself be justified; some things may be recommended arbitrarily. So even though there is no reason to pick the third carton from the left it may still be the case that there is a way to behave according to which that is the thing to do. Even if I am wrong about this, and a way to behave cannot decide between several equally good alternatives, we can stick to the idea of

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the recommendations characterising it as having the form: ‘This is the thing to do.’ What is necessary is that there is sufficient unspecificity in the notion of the thing to do. The thing to do is to pick a carton of milk. Only one thing is being recommended, but that one thing is indeterminate with respect to which carton is picked. A similar response to my initial formulation of a way of behaving might be that ways of behaving should be characterised not just by recommendations concerning what to do but also by recommendations concerning what not to do. For example, one rule that might characterise my supermarket behaviour would be: ‘When shopping with children, one thing not to do is to walk down the aisle that has all the sweets in it.’ But again I do not think this means we must reject the idea that a way of behaving is characterised by a system for deriving positive recommendation for action. For this is not the idea that a way of behaving is characterised merely by a set of positive recommendations for action. A system for deriving positive recommendations can incorporate negative principles like the one restricting supermarket behaviour. These are internal constraints within the method of determining positive recommendations. A system for deriving recommendations characterising a way of behaving may be described as a particular version of practical rationality.2 This is to take practical rationality to be something that embodies values rather than being merely a way to fit preferences and beliefs into some simple axiomatic system. Something counts as a reason for a certain action within some version of practical rationality if the recommendation of that action by the system depends on that thing being an input into it. So the fact that I need milk is one reason for picking a carton of milk from the shelf according to the version of practical rationality employing the rule outlined above. This is so because that version of practical rationality yields that recommendation, given the fact that I need milk (along with other facts). It is important to be clear that this is a relativistic notion of a reason for acting. As I am defining it, something is a reason for acting according to a certain version of practical rationality – not absolutely. There is nothing in the way I have set things up yet that rules out quite immoral or absurd versions of practical rationality. After all there are immoral and absurd ways of behaving that are characterised by such versions of practical rationality. According to a Kray twins version of practical rationality, a reason for nailing someone’s head to a table is

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that the person failed to show due respect, even though in an absolute sense we would want to say that that is not a reason for that action. Now a version of practical rationality that is manifested in a way of behaving need not (indeed perhaps could not) have recommendations for every possible proposition concerning the situation of the agent. For there are indefinitely many ways of describing the agent’s situation. So every version of practical rationality works with its own way of describing things. Nor need it provide recommendations for every possible outcome. There are indefinitely many properties that the result to be achieved might have; and for each of these properties we can ask whether the result to be achieved should have this property. In other words there are indefinitely many versions of the question: ‘Is such and such the result to be achieved?’ However precise the version of rationality, there will always be different questions about the situation of the agent that could be asked, which that version has got no answer for. The discovery of a new way of describing a situation may be the discovery of a new conclusion as to what behaviour is appropriate in that situation. For any set of questions that a version of practical rationality has recommendations for, one can construct new questions. There is no canonical way of describing the world. Physics is often thought to provide such a canonical description. And physics is certainly fundamental in some sense. Physics aims to describe the fundamental mechanisms of the universe on which everything else depends. But we must not confuse describing something on which everything else depends with describing everything. The cup of coffee on my table may depend in some way on the mechanisms described by physics, but that does not mean that the cup of coffee itself is described by physics. With the different ways of describing the world come different conceptions of what it is rational to do.3 You might describe some sound in terms of a series of tones, timbres and intensities. Such a description does not present the sound as something that it is reasonable to listen to. But once we can see that the sound is a piece of beautiful piano music, we may now have a good reason to listen to it. This was not a reason that was even articulatable until we developed a certain way of describing the sound. It is certainly not a reason that could be articulated in the language of physics. So the scope of a version of practical rationality must be delimited by a particular set of questions concerning the situation of the agent and concerning the outcomes to be achieved. Indeed, we can usefully think of practical rationality as a way of answering questions about

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what is to be achieved by a process of interrogating the environment. I will argue in Chapter 9 that knowledge should be understood similarly to be in the first instance knowledge of answers to questions, not simply knowledge of facts. A familiar way to represent this sort of process of reaching decisions through interrogating the environment is the flow chart often used to describe some required computing task. Figure 6.1 presents a simplistic example. What it is rational to do depends on which questions are asked, but since not every question can be asked, the choice of questions is also going to be something that may be determined by a version of practical rationality. A high-level version of practical rationality can ask the question, ‘What questions should be asked?’ This means that a version of practical rationality may be a dynamic, self-changing thing. So what it is to know a way of behaving is only rather roughly described in terms of the ability to turn propositions about a situation into recommendations concerning what is to be achieved. More generally, it amounts to being able to turn answers to questions about the situation into answers to questions about what should be achieved. And a version of practical rationality may be thought of as a way of mapping answers to questions concerning matters of fact on to answers to questions about what is to be achieved.

Is there any milk in the fridge?

Yes

Use the milk in the fridge!

No

Would it be easy to go to the shop and buy some milk?

Yes

Go to the shop and buy some milk!

No Give up!

Figure 6.1

What should I do to get some milk into my coffee?

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Now, having said all this, I will sometimes lapse back into talking of a version of practical rationality deriving one set of propositions from another set of propositions rather than deriving answers to questions from answers to other questions, when the more proper formulation seems too unwieldy and nothing hinges on the distinction. A way of deriving propositions or answers to questions is usually formalised as a structure of inference rules. These rules define a logic (not a deductive one of course). We might also think of it as something like an abstract mathematical function mapping answers to a series of questions on to answers to other questions. Put simply, the function or structure of inference rules that constitutes a version of practical rationality encapsulates a set of conditional statements of the following form: If the answer to such and such questions is so and so and so and so then the answer to such and such further questions is so and so and so and so.

The key thing is that the questions on the left-hand side of the conditionals include questions concerning what type of situation the agent is in and the questions on the right-hand side include questions concerning what is to be achieved. So to put it even more simply, practical rationality consists in a structure of inferences of the following form: In such and such a type of situation such and such is to be achieved.

The difference between this and the functionalist conception of practical rationality considered in Chapter 3 is fairly clear; the behaviourist conception makes no essential reference to states of mind.4 At the same time as recommending an overall result to be achieved, a version of practical rationality makes further recommendations concerning how the result is to be achieved. A version of practical rationality must provide recommendations for the results to be achieved at some distance from the agent, but it must also provide recommendations concerning what should happen with the agent’s body. For every situation there is a whole structure of recommendations at different levels, not just a single recommendation about what is to be achieved. What is recommended in the first instance is a set of goals – results that are to be achieved in the circumstances according to the version of rationality. If it is to be a practical version of rationality – one that might describe a way of behaving – then it must also be constrained in various ways. In particular, it must incorporate some method of meansends analysis. It must recommend not just the goals but also the means to achieve those goals.

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Any method of means-ends analysis must presume some repertoire of basic activity. It then determines the structure of such activity that leads to the goal being achieved. But, of course, it is never that simple. There may be competing goals that require incompatible structures of basic activity to achieve them. There may be no way to achieve a goal at all. Or there may be several ways, all equally effective at leading to the goals. A practical version of rationality should involve some way to resolve such problems. Some philosophers and social scientists try to construct versions of rationality that will include ways of resolving all conflict within them.5 The standard sort of idea here is that the goals should be assigned utility weightings by the version of rationality and the structure of basic activity that maximises the sum of the weightings of the achieved goals is recommended. This method of utility maximisation may be extended to deal with situations of uncertainty by factoring in probability weightings to the outcomes. Then the rational course of action is the one that maximises expected utility. Even if this utilitarian conception of rationality works at all it does not have very much to do with the versions of rationality that actually characterise what ordinary people’s ways of behaving are governed by. Problems of conflict constitute an intrinsic part of our ways of behaving. We don’t think these problems should be ruled out through a utility calculus. Degrees of preference are not input into our ways of working out what to do; they emerge from them. And what we actually do, and think we should do, in situations involving conflict is to think again. In such situations we need to renegotiate our goals in order to make sense of the situation.6 What it is rational to do, even by one’s own lights, is not something that can be determined just by looking within. For even by one’s own lights there are conflicts between incommensurable reasons. There will always be space for hard cases, where the correct decision does not just depend on making a kind of internal calculation based on internal weightings, but will depend on how one goes on to reconceptualise the situation to resolve the conflict.7 And it does not just depend on how one goes on but on how we go on. The process of renegotiation of a version of rationality involves some deference to how scientific and other social practices develop. It involves a ‘division of linguistic labour’.8 So it is intrinsic to a practical conception of rationality that its way of determining goals and means to achieving those goals should be renegotiated in the light of conflict and other problems. The idea is

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that a version of rationality is driven by a process of reinvention of itself in order to deal with such problems. Any version of rationality is open-ended and dynamic. This is a very difficult idea to understand fully. Think of a game with a set of rules, one of which allows the rules of the game to be changed. What do the rules tell you that can or should be done next? On the one hand, they may recommend some action. On the other hand, they may recommend that the rules should be changed to some other set of rules and some other possibly incompatible action be done as a result of these other rules. And they may make these recommendations simultaneously. So to describe the recommendations of the rules we must distinguish what should be done now as the rules stand and what should be done once the rules change. Both outcomes are recommended by the rules at different stages of the game. But the first outcome, although it is indeed recommended by the rules at some stage of their development, is not really the outcome recommended by the rules as a whole. For it is recommended by rules that turn out not to be the right rules. Playing this game properly requires you to do the action that the rules at this stage of their development recommend, and at the same time to acknowledge that you may be wrong to act in that way. The real point here is that when we say that such and such is what the rules of some game recommend, we should more properly say that it is what the rules recommend at this time. There may or may not be some timeless recommendation that the rules of the game will come up with when they have been worked through ad infinitum. In the same way any version of practical rationality makes recommendations at a time, not timelessly.9 Something similar might be said about the recommendations of a version of practical rationality from this or that person’s perspective. Different people’s versions of practical rationality are not independent entities, but may be thought of as different aspects of a single version of practical rationality in a constant internal dialogue. Just as the rational thing to do now may be to change my version of rationality, so the rational thing to do from my perspective may be to adapt to rational challenges from another person’s perspective. Indeed, assuming a plausible externalism about rationality, what is rational from my perspective may be partially constituted by what is rational from other perspectives. This dynamic idea of practical rationality gets closer to a genuinely practical conception of rationality. It is a messy open-ended

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conception. It is certainly not a conception that can be specified fully. So thinking of a version of practical rationality in terms of a static abstract function or logical system mapping answers to questions about matters of fact on to answers to questions about what is to be achieved is much too simple. A version of practical rationality can only be thought of as a changing function (and hence not strictly speaking a function at all in the mathematical sense), according to which certain results are recommended in certain situations, but also changes in the function itself are recommended in certain situations, so that those same results may not be recommended in the future in those sorts of situation.

II Psychological or Non-psychological Conceptions of Practical Rationality This idea of rationality being essentially dynamic is connected to the claim in Chapter 5, section V, that rational behaviour is behaviour that is sensitive to as opposed to governed by rules or norms. Practical rationality, as I am treating the term, is what determines recommendations for action. So one way of putting the claim is that rational behaviour is sensitive to practical rationality. Rational agents are disposed to act in a way that is sensitive to rationality. This means that their behaviour is governed by the rule: do what rationality demands. That is different from being governed by rationality directly.10 In being sensitive to rationality rather than governed by it rational agents must establish what the recommendations of rationality are; they must establish a particular version of rationality. And in doing what rationality as a dynamic whole demands, they are at any one time governed by such a version of rationality. So rational agents are sensitive to rationality as a dynamic whole, and at any one time governed by a particular version of rationality.11 The version of rationality that an agent is governed by will vary as the agent’s perspective changes. The way I have described practical rationality is clearly non-psychological. The dynamic way of deriving recommendations for action that constitutes a particular version of rationality does not take psychological states as its inputs except incidentally. Its inputs are types of situation that hold in the world (or answers to questions about such situations). If rationality were taken to be a static internally determinate thing then such psychological things as strengths of preference might need to be introduced as inputs to resolve conflicts. But as

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I have tried to show in the previous section, it is possible to conceive of rationality as an entirely abstract thing, like a system of logic except that unlike deductive logic, rationality in general is dynamic as well as being open-ended in the sense that its recommendations depend on things outside of any specific codification of its norms. Jonathan Dancy (2000) argues that the reasons that motivate us are not in general our psychological states. One way of seeing this is to look at a case where the reason that motivates us is our psychological state and to see how peculiar this case is. Dancy presents the example of a crumbly cliff. That I believe that the cliff is crumbling is my reason for avoiding climbing it, because having that belief I am more likely to fall off (I will get nervous) . . . I recognise that if the cliff were not crumbling I would still have just the same reason not to climb it as if it were, so long as I continue to believe it to be crumbling. But this is a quite unusual situation, not at all the normal case. Normally, I suppose that if things are not as I believe them to be, I do not in fact have the reason that I take myself to have (2000: 124).

Consider the rules of a game like the final of the English Football Association cup. The extra-time rule is not the following: Rule 1. You should stop the game and go into extra time if and only if you believe that 90 minutes of ordinary time have been played and the scores are level.

It is the following: Rule 2. You should stop the game and go into extra time if and only if 90 minutes of ordinary time have been played and the scores are level.

If you act on the false belief that 90 minutes of ordinary time have been played and the scores are level you are still acting rationally in a sense. But the rule that explains why you are acting rationally is not Rule 1 but Rule 2. You are behaving in a way that is sensitive to a set of rules including Rule 2. You are doing what this set of rules tells you to do on the assumption (false assumption) that the scores are level after ordinary time has been played. The fact that you are working on this assumption does not justify your behaviour. Its significance in rationalising your behaviour is that it points to what actually makes the behaviour rational, namely a set of rules that itself does not work on any such assumption. Your behaviour is rational in a secondary way, in that on the assumption that the scores are level after ordinary time it would be rational.12

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This ties in with the discussion in Chapter 5, section V, of the correct way to interpret Kant’s slogan that rational agency involves the power to act according to the idea of rules. I argued there that the idea of rules should not be taken to mean the agent’s internal attitude concerning the rules. In acting according to the idea of rules a rational agent is sensitive to the rules themselves. There is a gap between the rules and the agent’s behaviour. But this is not because the agent’s behaviour is really governed by internal shadows of the rules. It is because the agent’s behaviour is really governed by a second-order rule that says: do what the rules tell you to do. Only in this way is a rational agent sensitive to these rules. The behaviourist conception of a way of behaving starts with an abstract non-psychological conception of practical rationality. By stressing that practical rationality is an abstract mapping I am making clear that there does not have to be any physical process corresponding to the mapping. The function f(x)=x2 exists whether or not there is anything that actually transforms numbers into their squares. In the same way a version of practical rationality that maps answers to questions concerning matters of fact on to answers to questions concerning what is to be achieved does not actually have to transform matters of fact into achievements. It is abstract in this sense. Only if the version of practical rationality describes an actual mechanism is this abstract mapping realised in a physical transformation. For this we need the idea of a creature whose behaviour is sensitive to practical rationality so conceived. Its behaviour is subject to the rule that it should do what practical rationality recommends. I argued in Chapter 4 that what this should mean is that its behaviour results from a mechanism that (when it works properly) results in whatever that rule recommends. It is a do-what-is-rational mechanism, and, given the dynamic nature of rationality, no particular specification of rationality will describe the way it works generally. But a particular specification of rationality may provide a snapshot of that way of behaving at a certain time. There is no need to introduce mental terms in order to attribute such a way of behaving. It may be, however, that one cannot specify the version of rationality that describes someone’s way of behaving without using mental language. We might have to say that this is how to behave when you are proud of yourself, or anxious about the safety of your child, or when you have fallen in love. This is not a problem for non-reductive behaviourism, which generally only requires that such ways of behaving (proud ways, anxious ways,

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etc.) may be understood and attributed to a subject without having already to know the subject’s state of mind. That these ways of behaving cannot be specified except in mental terms is not to say that they cannot be attributed in advance of attributing a state of mind.

III The Holism of the Mental Many philosophers believe that the real threat to the non-reductive behaviourist concerns the holism of the mental. Roughly what it means to say that the mental is holistic is that you cannot be in a position to ascribe one feature of a state of mind to someone without at the same time being in a position to ascribe a whole set of features to the person. So a single mental feature is not to be identified with a disposition to behave in a certain way, but only with a disposition to behave in a certain way given the presence of a whole set of other mental features. And this appears to contradict the behaviourist identification of states of mind and behavioural dispositions. Gilbert Harman (1973) expressed this objection clearly: There is no noncircular way to specify the relevant dispositions. For they are dispositions to act in certain ways given certain situations; and the relevant situations essentially include beliefs about the situation and desires concerning it. What a man will do if he hits his thumb with a hammer depends on who he thinks is watching and what desires he has concerning his relationship to his watchers. But beliefs are dispositions to act in certain ways only given certain desires, whereas desires are dispositions to act in certain ways only given certain beliefs. A belief that it will rain will be manifested in the carrying of an umbrella only in the presence of a desire not to get wet; and the desire for money will manifest itself in acts that tend to get one money only if one believes that those acts will get one money. Since even in theory there is no noncircular way to specify relevant dispositions in pure behavioral terms, behaviorism cannot provide an adequate account of mental processes and experiences. (1973: 41)

The argument is in the first instance an attack on the thought that it is possible to specify a way of behaving corresponding to an individual aspect of a subject’s state of mind in isolation from the rest of that subject’s state of mind. But the conclusion might have been stronger. It is not just that we cannot specify a single way of behaving corresponding to the belief that it will rain; there is no such single way of behaving.

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This sort of argument is wheeled out in one form or another in almost every introduction to the philosophy of mind, where a position called philosophical behaviourism, which is associated with Ryle, is attacked. Ryle lays himself open to the attack when he seems to suggest for example that there is a single way of behaving corresponding to John Doe’s state (while he is fast asleep) of knowing French. ‘To say that this sleeper knows French, is to say that . . . he will cope pretty well with the majority of ordinary French-using and French-following tasks’ (1949: 123–4). To this we might, in the same sort of way as Harman, object that John, despite knowing French, may have a reason for concealing his ability to speak French – he is a French spy, for example – and will in fact cope very badly with the majority of Frenchusing and French-speaking tasks. So characterising knowing French in terms of just one way of behaving – that of coping well with the majority of French-using tasks – does not capture the proper range of the phenomenon being characterised. But Ryle is clearly only employing this account of knowing French as a toy example to illustrate his notion of a disposition. His view is that when we apply a mental predicate we are describing the way someone is disposed to behave. But this does not commit him to the view that for each mental predicate there is just one corresponding way of behaving. Describing something as concave is to describe its shape; but it does not follow that there is only one shape corresponding to the predicate ‘concave’. Now while the non-reductive behaviourism that I am trying to defend in this book is certainly not committed to there being a single disposition to behave corresponding to every mental predicate, its central claim is that what it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way. And Harman’s argument suggests that the best that we can do is to say that what it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way given that one has a certain set of other attitudes and to be disposed to behave in another way if one has another set of attitudes and so on. And if that is right then my central behaviourist claim is invalidated. The central behaviourist claim may be broken down into the following two claims: 1. We can attribute to people ways of behaving, which may be characterised by abstract functions mapping kinds of situation on to structures of recommendations about what is to be achieved, independently of attributing states of mind to them.13

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2. We can associate such functions with kinds of states of mind and so attribute states of mind to people on the basis of (1) above. Harman seems to be arguing that we can only attribute to people behavioural dispositions whose contents are determined by functions from kinds of situation and other states of mind to behaviour. However, this cannot be quite right. For if we can assign people a function from kinds of situation and other states of mind to kinds of behaviour, we can also assign to them a function just from kinds of situation to kinds of behaviour, where the overall state of mind is kept fixed. For example, if people are disposed to carry an umbrella in those situations in which it is both true that they are going outside and that they have a variety of beliefs and desires, then, in those situations when they have those beliefs and desires they are simply disposed to carry an umbrella when they go outside. The state of mind consisting in the beliefs and desires can be moved out from being a variable for the function to being a fixed parameter defining a specialised version of that function. Consider the following arithmetical example of specialisation. x  y is a 2-place function. It is called a 2-place function because any particular input to the function consists of two numbers. The function maps pairs of numbers – which go in the place of x and y – on to another number. For example the pair 3, 4 is mapped on to 7. From this 2place function we can construct any number of 1-place functions by eliminating one of the variables and substituting a constant. So we could take out y as a variable and substitute a particular constant value – say 13 – to make the 1-place function x  13. Any input to this function is a single number. The series of 1-place functions, x  1, x  2, . . ., are specialised versions of the 2-place function x  y, and the constants, 1, 2, . . ., that are substituted for the variable y are fixed parameters for these functions. We can apply this to the sort of function that figures in a functionalist-style theory of behaviour to produce a series of functions that constitute ways of behaving that a behaviourist account may employ. A functionalist folk-psychological theory might be captured by a 2-place function, f, which maps kinds of situation and existing states of mind on to kinds of situation. We can represent this as follows: f:{ x, y: x is a situation, y is a state of mind} → {x: x is a bit of behaviour}

Given this, we can construct a series of specialised 1-place functions, gm, where m is the fixed parameter corresponding to the variable y.

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So b
gm(s) if and only if b
f(s,m). Each gm maps a kind of situation on to a kind of behaviour. So Harman’s point better not be that a person is never disposed to behave in certain ways in certain circumstances. It should be uncontroversial that sometimes one is simply disposed to take an umbrella if one is going out. His point should rather be that we can never be entitled to say that a person is so disposed unless we are at the same time presuming a whole set of psychological attitudes. This is what the holism of the mental should amount to. But to meet this objection, the behaviourist only needs to concede that ways of behaving constituted by functions from kinds of situation to structures of recommendations concerning what is to be achieved are not associated with single psychological attitudes, but are associated with overall states of mind incorporating a whole set of psychological attitudes. The behaviourist must establish correspondence between overall states of mind on the one hand and overall ways of behaving on the other. Such overall ways of behaving are to be characterised by functions from kinds of situations to structures of recommendations concerning what is to be achieved. The phrase ‘mental state’ has been a term of art of philosophy of mind. It is used to mean a particular belief, or a particular intention, desire, and so on. I have been using the phrase ‘state of mind’ in a different way from this. If you describe someone’s state of mind you will have to specify a whole set of beliefs, intentions, emotions, and so on. Talk of an overall state of mind is just intended to stress this. Behaviourists themselves may not have been as clear as they should have been that in the first instance they were making a claim about what it is to be in a certain overall state of mind rather than what it is to have a certain mental state – i.e. a particular belief, desire, and so on. But if the moral of the holism of the mental is just that this should be clear, then it certainly does not warrant a rejection of behaviourism. So there could be no suitable behavioural disposition or way of behaving associated with the belief that it is raining or knowledge of French. But it certainly does not follow that there could be no behavioural disposition or way of behaving associated with an overall state of mind that includes the belief that it is raining or knowledge of French along with a lot of other things. To summarise this phase of the discussion, we may distinguish three conceptions of a way of behaving that get used in different accounts of interpretation.

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1. A way of behaving corresponding to a whole psychology

According to functionalism or theory theory, we derive knowledge of someone’s state of mind from a psychological theory of that person. This theory describes a way of behaving in a very broad sense. It is the person’s overall way of behaving, and includes all the combinations of possible psychological attitudes that person may have and what the person would do in those circumstances. The cluster of platitudes described by Lewis (1972: 256) in the quotation in Chapter 3, section II, describes how a person behaves in all possible circumstances. It does not correspond to a particular state of mind, but rather to an entire psychology. 2. A way of behaving corresponding to a single attitude

According to the too simplistic behaviourist who is being attacked by the argument from the holism of the mental, there is one way of behaving for every different psychological attitude. There is a believing-itwill-rain way of behaving. And there is another wanting-to-stay-dry way of behaving. 3. A way of behaving corresponding to an overall state of mind

According to a holistic behaviourist, knowledge of someone’s overall state of mind is knowledge of how that person behaves. On this conception there is not just one way of behaving per person. Nor is there one way of behaving per psychological attitude. There are as many ways of behaving as there are possible overall states of mind. There is one way of behaving which is believing that it will rain at the same time as wanting to stay dry and intending to go out, and so on. There is another way of behaving which is believing it will rain at the same time as wanting to get wet and believing that going out into the rain is the best way of getting wet, and so on. Given this, the challenge for the holistic behaviourist is to explain how we are entitled to attribute individual psychological attitudes to someone. Our knowledge of overall ways of behaving is in the first instance undifferentiated, but our way of describing their state of mind is in the first instance differentiated into specific psychological attitudes. In following someone’s way of behaving one knows that that person is behaving this way. And such knowledge constitutes knowledge of the person’s overall state of mind. But the ‘this’ here picks out a way of behaving without giving any way to decompose it into its constituent attitudes.

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IV The Dynamics of Interpretation We do not have one word for each overall type of state of mind. We communicate about the mind by referring to types of attitudes that together make up such overall states. The holistic behaviourist then is faced with the challenge of finding what is in common between different overall states of mind and their corresponding ways of behaving in order to factor out individual psychological attitudes. To explain how this is done, I will argue that we must think of interpretation dynamically – as always partial but on the road to improvement. I have already argued that this is how one should think of rationality too. A completed theory of behaviour corresponding to an overall psychology is at best an ideal and so not a stage in the actual process of interpreting people. But knowledge of a way of behaving that one has not yet decomposed into its constituent attitudes is an entirely achievable stage in the process of developing knowledge of someone’s state of mind. So let us start with an interpreter who knows a way of behaving. To begin with the interpreter only knows it as this or that way of behaving. That individual can follow it, recognise it, and perhaps even replicate it. Probably the first thing the person can do with it is share it. It seems very natural to assume that joint activity and joint attention develop early on as a child learns how to behave. So what the individual knows about this way of behaving is that it is how we behave. Knowing that this is how we behave is not just knowing something about a way of behaving; it also involves knowing the way of behaving itself. Roughly speaking, this means that an interpreter who knows a way of behaving must know how it is appropriate to behave in different situations given this way of behaving. According to a holistic behaviourist, knowing that someone is behaving in this way is knowing what state of mind that person is in. But such knowledge is not yet articulated into knowledge of the component attitudes that make up that state of mind. Let us suppose that according to this way of behaving, if it will rain you take your umbrella if you are going outside though not if you are staying inside, and if it is not going to rain you leave your umbrella whether or not you are going outside. It is now possible to work out a new way of behaving with the fact that it will rain as a given fixed parameter. According to this new way of behaving, you should take your umbrella if you are going outside but not if you are staying

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inside. If you know how to behave whether or not it will rain, you know how to behave on the assumption that it will rain. If you know that someone else is behaving in this restricted way, you can automatically attribute to that person the belief that it will rain. And you can do that without being in a position to attribute any other beliefs or desires to him or her. Employing a bit of mathematical terminology may make the point clearer. Suppose a way of behaving can be characterised by an n-place function fn, that maps an n-tuple of types of situations on to types of behaviour. A particular value of this function would be expressed by saying that when situation 1 obtains and situation 2 obtains and . . . and situation n obtains then behaviour fn(situation 1, situation 2, . . ., situation n) follows. Knowledge of how this function works constitutes knowledge of an overall type of state of mind without at this stage requiring any knowledge of how to decompose it into constituent attitudes. Suppose the nth place of this function is filled by the answer to the question of whether or not it will rain. Knowing how this n-place function works means that one also understands (n1)-place functions in which the variable in this nth place is eliminated in place of a fixed parameter. One knows one function corresponding to the assumption that it will rain and one knows another function corresponding to the assumption that it will not rain. So, one can derive the following two functions: gn1
fn(x1, x2, . . ., xn1, the fact that it will rain) gn1*
fn(x1, x2, . . ., xn1, the fact that it will not rain)

If you can use the 2-place function x  y and recognise its use, then you can also use and recognise the use of the 1-place functions x  1, x  2, and so on. Perhaps you start off learning how to recognise when a certain calculating machine is performing the function x  y. Then, when you see a machine performing the function x  1, you are in a position to attribute to it the assumption that y
1. In the same way you can attribute to a person a way of behaving that assumes that it will rain if you were already in a position to attribute a way of behaving that was variable with respect to the answer to whether or not it will rain. This may appear to contradict the concession towards holism made earlier on behalf of the holistic behaviourist. It now seems that there is a believes-it-will-rain way of behaving after all. But, in fact what we have here is not a way of behaving that corresponds to the

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belief that it will rain, but a way of behaving – one among many – that entitles you to attribute the belief that it will rain. Being able to attribute this belief on the basis of knowing that someone is behaving in this sort of way does not mean that you are in a position to attribute that belief in every psychological combination in which it appears. So far you are only in a position to attribute that belief embedded in a very specific psychological context. The way of behaving we started with corresponded to a certain state of mind, but was variable with respect to various features of the situation. Just knowing this way of behaving does not give you knowledge of how to describe that state of mind. But it does give you the basis for deriving a series of more limited ways of behaving where some of the variable features of the situation are kept fixed. Knowledge of these more limited ways of behaving and their relationship with the initial way of behaving enables you to attribute beliefs concerning these variable features. Interpretation proceeds in a series of crabwise manoeuvres. The next step is to enrich the initial way of behaving by learning how to discriminate different kinds of situation and by learning how to behave given the different possibilities for these situations. In other words, places for new variables may be added to the function that characterises a way of behaving. Then by holding some of these new features fixed we develop ways of attributing new beliefs. The method should apply to intentions in a parallel way. You might start off knowing a way of behaving according to which you act in one way if G is to be achieved and in another way if G is not to be achieved. Given this, you know how to behave on the assumption that G is to be achieved, and if someone else is behaving in this way, then you can say that the person intends to achieve G. Just how this approach should deal with the interpretation of other psychological aspects of someone’s overall state of mind – the person’s emotions for instance – need not concern us at this stage. If the approach is plausible for beliefs and intentions, then the potted objection to a Rylean approach that it fails to accommodate the holism of the mental is refuted. In summary, any way of behaving, however inclusive and advanced, will express certain rigidities and fixed assumptions. There is no such thing as a perfectly adaptable way of behaving. Any way of behaving works with some fixed conception of how to distinguish between different situations. So no way of behaving can be entirely neutral as to the state of mind of the agent, and any way of

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behaving corresponds to a certain state of mind, rather than to an entire psychology. Knowing a way of behaving does not in itself give you compositionally structured knowledge of that state of mind. But knowing a way of behaving can be the basis for deriving knowledge of more limited ways of behaving that take certain things for granted. Being able to see how someone behaves in these more limited ways gives us knowledge that that person is taking these things for granted. But this sort of knowledge can be built up one belief and one intention at a time. Saying that someone has a certain belief is describing the person’s way of behaving. This is not because there is a specific way of behaving corresponding to that belief. Rather, it is because that person’s way of behaving corresponding to his or her overall state of mind has the property of being committed to a certain assumption. When a person’s way of behaving has this property we describe the person as holding that assumption him- or herself. This is the basis of the behaviourist account of beliefs and intentions that I develop in the next two chapters.

Notes 1. Kenny (1975: 81ff.) calls this the logic of satisfactoriness rather than the logic of satisfaction. 2. In Stout (2005) I use the phrase ‘system of justification’ to mean exactly the same thing. 3. This acknowledgement of the possibility of multiple versions of practical rationality should not be taken to involve a concession to relativism or anti-realism about practical rationality. See Brandom (1994: Chapter 8) for a neo-Hegelian attempt to make room for objectivity given this sort of acknowledgement. 4. Of course, states of mind might figure in ‘such and such a type of situation’, but they might not. 5. See the discussion of decision theory in Chapter 5, section IV. 6. David Wiggins (1987) describes this process of renegotiation as situational appreciation, basing his idea on an interpretation of Aristotle’s aesthesis. 7. See Charles Taylor’s (1977) treatment of Sartre’s case of the boy who might either become a freedom fighter or stay at home to look after his mother. 8. See Putnam (1975: 227). 9. This ties in with the discussion of the dynamic nature of theories and meaning in Chapter 3, section II.

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10. If angels are characterised as being governed by rationality rather than as being sensitive to it, as humans are, this may threaten their status as rational agents according to my approach. 11. This talk of being governed by a version of rationality suggests that my approach to agency is incompatible with free will. But the word ‘governed’ needs to be understood in the bland sense introduced in Chapter 5, section V. My model leaves plenty of scope for free will in the process of being sensitive to rationality itself – a process that determines what version of rationality one will be governed by at any particular time. 12. I develop this attack on psychological conceptions of practical rationality in Stout (2004) and Stout (2005: Chapter 3). 13. As I explained in section I this talk of functions from kinds of situations on to structures of recommendations is a simplification, but it does enable the point of this section to be made relatively clearly.

7

Beliefs

I Introduction I have been presenting a behaviourist account of the mind that takes off from the claim discussed in Chapter 5 that a rational agent is disposed to behave in a way that is sensitive to practical rationality. In Chapter 6 I argued that practical rationality is open-ended and dynamic. This means that at any one time, in being sensitive to practical rationality, an agent’s behaviour is governed by a particular version of practical rationality, but that this version, as part of its very nature, is subject to revision. Given this notion of what it is to be a rational agent the behaviourist claim at the very beginning of the book may be amplified a bit. The original claim was this: What it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way.

The amplified version is this: What it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a certain version of practical rationality.

To describe the particular version of rationality that someone’s way of behaving is governed by at any one time is to describe the person’s mind at that time. In this chapter I spell out that claim with respect to beliefs, and in the next with respect to intentions. In the next section I introduce Richard Braithwaite’s account of belief developed in the 1930s. The core of his theory is that believing a proposition is being disposed to act as if that proposition were true. This use of the phrase ‘as if’ is misleading, since it suggests that the relevant behaviour is a kind of pretending. But Braithwaite spells out the notion of acting as if a proposition were true in a way that avoids this absurd implication. Acting as if a proposition were true is taken to amount to acting in a way that is appropriate on the assumption that

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the proposition is true. I will try to defend this very simple account of belief, working out what it might amount to in a bit more detail. The discussion of holism in the previous chapter made it clear that there is never just one thing that it is appropriate to do given some assumption. So when we attribute to people a belief in a proposition we are saying that they are disposed to behave in a way that assumes that proposition. And this means that they are disposed to behave in one of the infinitely many ways that assumes that proposition. The formulation that I will defend is the following: A subject believes a proposition if and only if that person is disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that works on the assumption that that proposition is true.

A version of practical rationality is a way of deriving recommendations for action from propositions about the situation. As I put it in the previous chapter, it is like a function from kinds of situation to structures of recommendations concerning outcomes. What it means for a version of practical rationality to work on some assumption is intuitively quite clear: the recommendations it makes depend on that assumption. But to make this idea a bit more precise we would need to bring to bear the ideas introduced in Chapter 6, section IV, and describe the version of practical rationality as a specialised form of a slightly more general version of practical rationality. A version of practical rationality, C1, works on the assumption that p if and only if there is a version of practical rationality, C2, that is variable with respect to the question of whether or not p, and C1 is a specialised version of C2 substituting the assumption that p in place of this variable.

Mainly in what follows I won’t use all this paraphernalia, but just talk of a way of behaving working on an assumption.

II Cambridge Behaviourists Frank Ramsey, despite having read and been influenced by Peirce, claimed rather oddly that his own pragmatism derived from Bertrand Russell. ‘The essence of pragmatism I take to be this, that the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects’ (Ramsey [1926] 1978: 57). This is a very thin sort of pragmatism since Ramsey’s conception of a practice was of a causally defined structure of utterances and

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actions. This is to be contrasted with the normatively defined structure that later pragmatists like Dewey and Sellars took a practice to be – a conception I defended in Chapter 2, section III. So, whereas, Dewey and Sellars would be able to say that the meaning of a sentence was a function of the place it ought to occupy in a practice if that practice were working properly, Ramsey was only able to say that the meaning of a sentence was a function of the actual causal role that the utterance of that sentence played in the actual causal structure of a linguistic practice. Ramsey did employ the apparently normative notion of usefulness. But following the empiricist tradition of Bentham and Mill, he did not take this notion to be irreducibly normative. Usefulness is understood in terms of utility maximisation, where utility is understood in terms of actual preferences. So Ramsey said of the kind of belief that a chicken would have while avoiding poisonous caterpillars ‘that in regard to this kind of belief the pragmatist view was correct, i.e. that the relation between the chicken’s behaviour and the objective factors was that the actions were such as to be useful if, and only if, the caterpillars were actually poisonous. Thus any set of actions for whose utility p is a necessary and sufficient condition might be called a belief that p, and so would be true if p, i.e. if they are useful’ ([1926] 1978: 46). Ramsey defined a set of axioms according to which states of affairs may be ordered in terms of preference, and degrees of preference (sometimes described as utility values) may be assigned to different outcomes by comparing various conditional situations. For example, you may prefer C to B to A. This gives an ordinal scale of preferences. But the scale can be made more precise by comparing the conditional situation in which A if a coin comes up heads and C if it comes up tails with the unconditional outcome B. If B wins its degree of preference is greater than the average of those of A and C, and so is more than halfway along the scale to C in terms of its degree of preference. Now call the conditional situation described above D and compare the doubly conditional situation in which A if a coin comes up heads and D if it comes up tails with the outcome B. By iterating this procedure indefinitely we can approach real number values for the degrees of preference of A, B and C. Degrees of belief can be determined in a similar way. The degree of belief a subject has in a certain proposition is defined roughly as the odds at which the subject would accept a bet on the truth of that proposition. The bet need not be thought of as a financial one; it is a bet

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calculated in terms of degrees of preference. It has something like the following form. You have two options: to bet on proposition p being true and to bet on p being false. If you win the bet on p being true you get some reward with degree of preference a, and if you win the bet on p being false you get some reward with degree of preference b. If you are quite indifferent as to which option to take, then your degree of belief in the proposition p is a/(a  b). So the degree to which something is valued and the degree to which something is believed by subjects may both be read off the way subjects choose in their behaviour between the various options they do or might face. This may be construed as a functionalist account of degree of preference and degree of belief. Ramsey, however, wanted it to be the basis for an account of probability. According to Ramsey, what it is to believe that some outcome has probability p is to believe with degree p that that outcome will occur. Describing some outcome as having a certain probability makes no sense for Ramsey except in terms of having a certain degree of belief in that outcome. So he denied objective – belief-independent – probabilities. In this respect his position on probability is thoroughly pragmatist. Rather than give an account of probability as such he provided a pragmatic account of what it is to believe some outcome has a certain probability. Ramsey’s account has become one of the corner stones of decision theory – or rational choice theory. Decision theory provides a calculus for determining the right choices in conditions of uncertainty and when outcomes depend on other outcomes. What ‘right’ or ‘rational’ choice means is just preferred choice; but preferred given certain assumptions about how preferences should be distributed. Decision theory is usually set up as a model for explaining and predicting preference-optimising behaviour. It may also be seen as normative – telling you how you should behave in order to be rational in one way. Its limitations both as an explanatory method and as a normative method are fairly evident, however. It must take a basic set of preferences as given and then work to establish further preferences on the basis of these and some further assumptions. But, except perhaps when learning how to behave, preferences are never just given to a person. The basic preferences themselves are arrived at through some normative method, some method of conceptualising the world. And on this matter, decision theory is silent. The problem is perhaps one of trying to squeeze too much from Ramsey’s account. Ramsey provided a structure of inferences from probabilistic claims to decisions about conditional situations. This

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structure of inferences was supposed to constitute the very concept of probability. It was not supposed to exhaust the norms of decisionmaking. Indeed, the structure of inferences does not really say how you should behave so much as provide a logical framework within which such decisions can be made. Interpreting Ramsey’s rules for fixing the concept of probability as a theory of rationality in action, as decision theorists do, is to mistake the framework for the content.1 A colleague of Ramsey, Richard Braithwaite, also proposed a behaviourist or semi-behaviourist account of belief. My thesis is that ‘I believe one of these [contingent and not directly known] propositions p,’. . . means the conjunction of the two propositions: (1) I entertain p . . ., and (2) I have a disposition to act as if p were true . . . The former proposition is one about my mental experience and the second one about my physical behaviour. (Braithwaite 1933: 132) Thus my disposition to act as if strawberries gave me indigestion means that, under relevant external circumstances (my being offered strawberries) and my needs being to preserve my health, I shall behave in a manner appropriate to the indigestibility of strawberries, namely, I shall refuse them. Under similar external circumstances, if my need is to have indigestion (e.g., in order to avoid some unpleasant duty), I shall accept the strawberries. (Braithwaite 1933: 134)

Braithwaite’s account is only semi-behaviourist since he includes a condition about his mental experience, namely that he entertains the proposition he believes. But I think this condition may simply be ignored. We believe plenty of things that we have never in our lives entertained. Ever since I can remember, I have believed that elephants do not hatch from ducks’ eggs, but I have only entertained this proposition for the first time just as I write it down. So I shall ignore the condition that believed propositions must be entertained.2 Something else that is worth noticing about the account is that it is explicitly normative. Having the disposition to act as if p were true is spelt out in terms of being disposed to behave in ways that are appropriate to the truth of p. This gives Braithwaite’s account a flexibility that Ramsey’s lacks. I am not sure that Braithwaite is right to limit his account to contingent beliefs – beliefs that might be true or false. I think that what I would do if I were acting on the assumption that 2  2
4 were true is different from what I would do if I were acting on the assumption that 3  3
6 were true. For example, I would immediately infer that 2  2  1
4  1 if I were acting on the assumption that 2  2
4

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were true. So I do not think that the only inferences that can be appealed to in a conception of what behaviour is appropriate to the truth of a proposition are the inferences of deductive logic. According to deductive logic, I can infer anything from a necessary falsehood. But I can immediately infer from 2  2
9 that 2  2  1
9  1, whereas I cannot immediately infer that the moon is made of cheese. I develop this in section V below. In one respect in which Braithwaite’s theory differs from Ramsey’s, it might be thought that Ramsey’s is better. Suppose you believe that you will catch the 8 a.m. train, but you are not absolutely certain. Suppose also that you are offered a bet according to which you will get a small present if you catch the train, and will have to give up your entire life if you miss it. Would you take the bet? No. But taking the bet is the behaviour that is appropriate to the fact that you will catch the train, since on the assumption that you catch the train, the bet is a good one. So this seems to be a case where you do not act on the assumption that you will catch the train, even though you believe you will catch the train. If we bring in Ramsey’s idea of degrees of belief, the counterexample can be managed. If you believe with a degree of 0.99 that you will catch the train and the disutility of losing your entire life is more than 100 times greater than the utility of the small present, then according to Ramsey’s decision theory you should not take the bet. And of course this fits in with your preferences against taking such a bet. In fact I do not think that this argument against Braithwaite works. We should ask what sorts of facts make betting behaviour appropriate. Facts about the uncertain future are not the sorts of fact that justify betting. So it is wrong to assume that the fact that you will catch the train would justify your taking the bet. The bet is a good one on the assumption that you catch the train only in the sense that the bet will increase your welfare on that assumption. But the taking of a bet is not justified by whether such a bet will increase your welfare. The fact that taking the bet will in fact make you a little bit better off does not justify taking it. The bet is only justified by whether the facts about probabilities given the evidence available mean that expected welfare is being maximised. In this case such facts do not mean that expected welfare would be maximised by taking the bet. Even if I am acting on the assumption that I will catch the train, I should still refuse the bet. The point is that your goal is not merely to win a small present while not losing your whole life. If that were your only goal then, working on the assumption that you will catch the train you should accept the

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offer – an offer which in this context would not have the quality of a bet. In fact you have other goals – goals that take account of probabilities. You might have the goal of maximising your expected welfare. Or more simply you might have the goal of getting presents without taking undue risks. Even assuming you will catch the train you should not take the bet given these goals. For, although you would get the present, you would be taking an undue risk and so not maximising expected welfare. Given these goals, the assumptions that are relevant to your behaviour are assumptions about probabilities not assumptions about the uncertain future.3 Now, one might argue that all goals are like this and so that assumptions about the uncertain future are never relevant to decision-making. This view would treat every action as a bet of some sort. Ramsey ([1926] 1978: 85) has this view: ‘Whenever we go to the station we are betting that a train will really run.’ This would mean that no action was justified by an assumption about the uncertain future. In this case, given Braithwaite’s account, you could not have a belief about the uncertain future. This, I take it, is an undesirable consequence. But I am not so sure that every decision should be taken to be a bet. Ramsey considers only a very sophisticated sort of practical reasoning. When you determine whether to take a bet you must combine the different probabilities (or degrees of belief) of the different outcomes with their different degrees of preference. But for more run of the mill decision-taking you just make some assumption about the future and determine what to do on the basis of that. Suppose I am buying an advance train ticket in which I have to designate the time of the train. On the assumption that I will catch the 8 a.m. train I should designate 8 a.m. This is not a bet and probabilities do not come into it. Now the decision whether to designate the 8 a.m. train may be construed as a sort of bet. Then the cost of failing to catch the 8 a.m. train given that I have designated it, weighted by the likelihood of that outcome, should be compared with the expected cost of not designating the 8 a.m. train. But this is not the only way to work out how to behave in this situation. I might just assume that I will catch the 8 a.m. train and determine what train to designate on that basis. There is a characteristic psychological stress associated with taking a bet. Most often we are not determining what to do by weighing up probabilities of different outcomes and their utilities. If I have to decide whether to buy a cheaper APEX ticket in which I have to designate the precise time of the train, I know that I am making a bet (I can feel the stress). Having taken that decision, there is not the same stress

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associated with determining which time to designate. I’ll go for the 8 a.m. train and just assume that I am going to catch it.

III Belief as a State Given the account of dispositions that I argued for in Chapter 4, to attribute a disposition to someone is to describe that person’s state. And so to attribute a belief to someone is also to describe a state of that person. This is a realist treatment of dispositions. It is to be contrasted with an anti-realist treatment of dispositions that is often associated with a behaviourist or pragmatist approach and attributed to Wittgenstein and Ryle, according to which attributing a disposition or a mental attitude to someone is not to describe that person’s state. Now it is not completely clear that either Wittgenstein or Ryle should be described as anti-realist about dispositions. As we saw in Chapter 4, section II, although Ryle claimed that disposition statements do not report matters of fact (1949: 120), this might just have been a vivid way to express the difference between the functions of disposition statements and non-dispositional statements. It need not have amounted to a denial that disposition statements describe states in some sense. Wittgenstein argued that attributing a mental attitude to someone should be understood in terms of what such attribution expresses rather than what it refers to. But in fact Wittgenstein did not deny that belief is a state of mind. Instead he warned against assimilating this to other claims about states of things.4 It is certainly true, however, that neither Wittgenstein nor Ryle wanted to accept the further claim I have argued for that dispositions and mental attitudes in particular must be grounded in causal mechanisms. I have argued that to say that X has a disposition to φ is to say that X embodies a causal mechanism, which, when it works, results in X φ -ing. Given this, a realist version of Braithwaite’s account may be spelt out as follows: A subject believes a proposition if and only if the subject embodies a mechanism that results in behaviour that is governed by a version of practical rationality that works on that assumption.

This does not mean that there must be such a mechanism within the person who has a belief. The mechanism is not inside the person – perhaps in his or her brain – but actually is the person in the state that

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person is in. So, being a realist about dispositions does not commit one to identifying the disposition with an internal brain state, as for example Armstrong (1968: Chapter 5) supposed. If a glass is fragile this does not mean that there is anything smaller than the glass itself which has the disposition to break under impact. No doubt the state of the glass depends on the states of parts of the glass, just as the dispositional state of a person depends on the state of his or her brain. But dependence is not the same as identity. One thing that inclines some philosophers towards anti-realism about beliefs is Moore’s paradox.5 There is no contradiction in meaning in saying something of the following form: ‘It will not rain but I believe that it will rain.’

Yet there is some sort of contradiction in making the assertion. At the root of the paradox is the fact that asserting that it will rain and asserting that one believes that it will rain are very closely related assertions. They are so closely related that it amounts almost to a contradiction to assert one and deny the other. This point – that an assertion of belief functions pragmatically very like an assertion of the thing believed – has led some philosophers to argue that beliefs are not psychological states at all. To say that one believes that it will not rain is not to make a claim about oneself at all, but to make a claim about the weather – a slightly qualified claim. A version of this argument is expressed by Arthur Collins (1987), helpfully laid out in the following form by Jonathan Dancy (2000: 111). (1) If there are inner states of belief that p, then the existence of such a state does not require it to be true that p. This is guaranteed by the fact that some beliefs are false. (2) Therefore, to say that the inner state of belief that p is present in A is not to say it is true that p. It does not express any stand on whether it is the case that p or not, something that is a different and independent matter of fact. (3) (2) obtains even if it is A himself who says (reports) the presence of the inner state. (4) If believing that p is an inner state, A can state that he believes that p (the inner state is present) without expressing a stand on whether it is the case that p. (5) Since A cannot do this, believing that p is not an inner state.

Assumption (1) seems clear enough. Assuming that (2) is to be understood as a universally quantified claim applying to all propositions, p,

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and all subjects, A, then (3) certainly follows from it, as does (4). (5) just depends on Moore’s paradox, which I think we should accept. I think that the doubtful stage in this argument is the inference from (1) to (2). The thought behind it is that stating the fact that something is in a certain inner state cannot itself commit one to any view about something else altogether. Collins claims that you should be able to describe the inner state of something, even if that something is yourself, without making such a commitment. So if your belief that it will not rain is an inner state you ought to be able to describe it without making any commitment to a view about the actual weather. But, according to my behaviourist account of belief, stating that one believes that p is indeed to make a commitment to its being true that p. To believe that p is to be in a state that disposes one to behave in a way (one of the infinitely many ways) that is appropriate on the assumption that p. Does describing oneself as being in such a state involve taking a stand on whether or not it is true that p? I think it does. Describing oneself as being disposed to act on the assumption that p is to describe oneself as being committed in one’s behaviour to its being true that p. If I describe myself as being committed to the truth of the proposition that p, that description commits me to the truth of the proposition as well as to the truth of the fact that I am committed to the proposition. The term ‘commitment’ is being used in a rather weak sense here. Generally we think of a commitment as binding you morally, and certainly there is no moral commitment involved in believing something. Nor is there any binding in the usual sense. Being committed to the truth of a proposition leaves you quite free to change your mind about it. Why it is right to talk about commitment at all when describing belief is that if you believe some proposition then you are in a state in which you should act on the assumption of that proposition. You should so act and also your behaviour is sensitive to the fact that you should so act. On my behaviourist account, to believe a proposition is to be disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that assumes that proposition. In other words you are disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality in which you should act on the assumption of that proposition. Note that on this account the belief does not make it rational to act in a certain way. Having the belief simply means that it is rational according to your way of behaving to act in such a way.

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To clarify the argument here we can construct Moore’s paradox without mentioning belief at all. It is paradoxical to say the following: ‘I am committed to its being true that p, but it is not true that p.’

In this form it is clearer what sort of pragmatic contradiction is in place. Making the claim that it is not true that p commits you to its not being true that p. So we can infer from the fact that you assert that it is not true that p that you are committed to its not being true that p. And it is difficult to see how you can be committed to its not being true that p at the same time as being committed to its being true that p. The key point is that in describing your own commitment to the fact that it will not rain you are making two commitments – one to the fact that you have that commitment and one to the fact that it will not rain. Someone may be committed to its being true that p without its being true that p. So in general it is possible to describe someone as being committed to its being true that p without taking a stand on whether or not it is true that p. And of course this goes for oneself too if the commitment is in the past or the future. But it does not apply to oneself if the commitment that is being described is a present commitment. For in that case one would be describing oneself as having one commitment while at the same time expressing no commitment. There is no obvious reason why we cannot think of a psychological state as involving being committed to something, although perhaps to describe such a state as ‘inner’ is misleading. To say that I believe that it will rain is to describe my state as that of being disposed to act in a way that works on the assumption that it will rain. This amounts to being disposed to take a stand in my behaviour (including verbal behaviour of course) on whether or not it will rain. So to describe myself as taking such a stand and in the same breath to take the opposite stand is contradictory in the pragmatic sense I have been considering. It follows that Moore’s paradox does not mean that we have to deny that beliefs are states in some sense. Indeed, I think that such a denial would not make a lot of sense. Collins argues that we should not think of people who say that they believe that it will not rain as describing anything at all in themselves. They are expressing a commitment to the proposition that it will not rain, just as they would if they simply said that it will not rain. But, according to Collins, they are not describing this commitment. On this view, saying that I believe that it will not rain is exactly the same in meaning as saying that it will not rain. The only difference is one of stress, uncertainty, and so on.

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If you ask someone whether it will rain and the person says that he or she believes that it will not, the purpose of that utterance is not to tell you about that person, it is to tell you about the weather, with some qualification of uncertainty. That person’s answer functions in much the same way as the response, ‘Probably not.’ This certainly makes it seem that saying that you believe something is not describing yourself. But although saying that someone believes that it will not rain serves the function that saying that it will probably not rain serves, the two utterances do not have exactly the same roles. To see this, consider the conversation continuing a bit. Suppose you say, ‘That’s not true.’ The significance of this if someone has said that that person believes it will not rain is quite different from the significance of this if he or she has said that it will probably not rain. ‘I believe it will not rain.’ ‘That’s not true.’ ‘It will probably not rain.’ ‘That’s not true.’

By saying ‘That’s not true,’ in the first case you are not making a claim about the weather whereas in the second case you are. Now suppose you go on to ask the person whether that person believed that ten minutes ago, and the individual might say no he or she did not; what the person believes has now changed. Saying that you had or did not have a belief in the past is not to express your commitment to the proposition (because it is to describe a past commitment). But there is something seamless about the transition from talking about your past beliefs to talking about your present beliefs. You are not using the word ‘belief’ in a different way. Equally you are not uttering some pun when you say that now we both believe that it will not rain. The first-person present ascription of a belief does function in much the same way as an avowal of the proposition believed. But the way it is related to other utterances is quite different from the way the avowal of the proposition believed does. The point is that saying that you believe that it will not rain does express a commitment to the truth of its not raining. So if you want to express this commitment, saying that you believe it will rain will do as well as saying that it will rain. But it does more than just express this commitment. It also describes your state as one of being committed to the truth of the proposition. By describing this commitment you thereby express it. But that does not

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mean that all there is to the description of the commitment is that expression.

IV Belief and Judgement It is very common for accounts of belief to distinguish between belief and judgement and to claim that belief is the disposition to judge. Different philosophers have described the disposition to judge as tacit belief or dispositional belief and the judgement as occurrent belief or explicit belief.6 The thought here is that there are plenty of things that one has never thought about but that one would assent to if asked. For example, consider the proposition that Mars is more than twelve miles away from Saturn. It is very unlikely that a person reading this for the first time has ever encountered that exact proposition before, but most people would instantly assent to it once they entertained it. Also if you were asked now whether you believed the proposition yesterday, you would probably say that you did, even though you encountered it for the first time today. Yesterday you believed the proposition, but without entertaining it. Thinking about it now you believe it while entertaining it. It seems that these two states must be different. But your state of belief has not changed. The difference is not a difference in your belief, but in the fact that in one case you are entertaining the proposition while believing it and in the other you are not. What is required to explain the different states of mind is an account of what it is to entertain a proposition rather than an account of two kinds of belief. I will consider how a behaviourist might explain occurrent thinking in Chapter 10. The rough idea is that to entertain a proposition is to be disposed to express that proposition if you were required to think aloud. But the main point I want to insist on in this section is that the difference between believing a proposition while entertaining it and believing a proposition while not entertaining it is not a matter for an account of belief. Believing a proposition while entertaining it is not the same thing as judging the truth of that proposition. If you concentrate hard you can probably entertain the proposition that Henry VIII had six wives for ten or twenty seconds at least. But you were not judging it for that long. Judgements are things you make; judgings are things you do. But believings and entertainings are not things you make or do. Judging and believing belong to quite different categories from one another. In

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the course of entertaining the proposition for twenty seconds you may have judged its truth once, perhaps more than once, or not at all. So judgement should definitely not be taken to be any sort of explicit or occurrent belief. And judging a proposition is not the same as entertaining that proposition either. Judging is not just something that goes on in silent thought. You may judge aloud, by saying, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Or you may judge by acting non-linguistically. You may make a judgement by pressing a button. Perhaps you are a subject in a psychological test in which you are asked to press a button when you judge that two sounds occur simultaneously. You may say to yourself, ‘Yes, those sounds are simultaneous,’ and press the button. But after a few of these, you are going to get fed up with saying that to yourself each time, and you will probably just press the button without entertaining any thought while you do it. And there is no need to restrict the notion of judging by acting to such odd cases. Every move you make involves multiple implicit judgements. As you cross the road, you judge that there is a space to cross, you judge that in order to get to the other side you have to go round a parked car. You judge the position and height of the pavement with respect to your stride. And generally you do all these things without saying anything at all to yourself, although of course you may keep up a running commentary if you feel like it. So perhaps what it is to judge the truth of a proposition is to act in a way whose rationality depends on the truth of that proposition. Given this behaviourist approach to judgement, the behaviourist about belief should not have too much difficulty with accepting the theory that believing something is being disposed to judge its truth. According to the behaviourist account of belief, to believe that p is to be disposed to behave in a way that is rational given the assumption that p. If you are disposed to behave in a way that is rational on the assumption that p, then if the right way to behave depends on whether or not it is true that p, you will act in a way whose rationality depends on the truth of p. In other words, if you are faced with a situation in which the rational way to behave depends on whether or not it is true that p, you will judge that p. You are disposed to judge that p. Quite often the dispositional account of belief is spelt out by saying that what it means to say that you believe that p is that if you were to entertain the proposition that p, you would judge that p. But this is not the right way to spell it out. The relevant situations in

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which you should judge that p are not those in which you entertain the proposition but those in which the rationality of your behaviour depends on the truth or falsity of that proposition. This can be seen by considering some attempted counterexamples to the dispositional account. Lycan (1986) introduces the example of the opinionated man. He cannot entertain any proposition without instantly forming a judgement on it. The judgement he forms will be on the basis of some arbitrary psychological mechanism. So, for any proposition, if that proposition is entertained, he will judge instantly either that it is true or that it is false. Consider the proposition that lemurs live in Madagascar, and suppose the opinionated man has no knowledge of or interest in lemurs. We want to say that he neither believes the proposition to be true nor believes it to be false. But, if he is forced to entertain the proposition he is disposed to judge its truth one way or the other. Perhaps his psychological mechanisms are such that he will instantly accept the proposition. The opinionated man before being faced with the proposition that lemurs live in Madagascar neither believed nor disbelieved the proposition, yet he was disposed to accept the proposition if he entertained it. This suggests that it is not a good theory of belief to say that someone believes a proposition if and only if the person would judge it to be true if he or she entertained the proposition. But this is not the theory under consideration. The theory under consideration is that someone believes a proposition if and only if the person would judge it to be true if the rational way to behave depended on whether or not it was true. Was the opinionated man disposed to behave in a way that would be rational on the assumption that lemurs live in Madagascar in those situations where the rationality of his behaviour depended on the truth or falsity of this assumption, whether or not he was entertaining the proposition at the time? Would he have instantly acted appropriately to that assumption if he needed to find a lemur in a zoo and he found himself in the Madagascar section of the zoo? Perhaps he would have had the sense not to entertain any thoughts and just look around for a lemur instead. What he would do if he entertained a thought does not seem relevant to the question of what he believes. So, identifying a belief with a disposition to judge is fine so long as judgement is not limited to assenting to entertained propositions. If judging is taken to be behaving in ways that depend for their rationality on the truth of a proposition, then being disposed to judge a

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proposition amounts to the same thing as being disposed to behave in a way that is rational on the assumption that the proposition is true. Lynne Rudder Baker (1995) has an approach to belief that is dispositional and broadly speaking behaviourist. She describes her position as ‘Practical Realism’, which I think bears witness to the influence of the same kind of pragmatism that has a role in philosophical behaviourism. The thesis of Practical Realism is this: Whether a person S has a particular belief (individuated by a ‘that’ clause in its attribution) is determined by what S does, says, and thinks, and what S would do, say and think in various circumstances, where ‘what S would do’ may itself be specified intentionally. (1995: 154–5)

Baker claims that her position is not behaviourist. For one thing, she is happy to accept the functionalist idea that the way the ‘various circumstances’ may be spelt out will include other attitudes that S has. For another she claims the following: One may have a belief even if there are no relevant nonactual circumstances in which one would manifest it in overt behaviour . . . Suppose that Sims has a secret belief that Stalinism is the best form of government, but that she is always careful not to betray her belief in anything that she says or does. Also suppose that, as it happens, throughout Sims’ life there is never a nearby possible world in which the belief would affect what she said or did in a relevant way . . . Still, having that belief must make some difference, in this case a difference in her thoughts. For example, if Sims were to read of the demise of Stalinism, she would regret its passing. (1995: 155)

But Sims’ sense of regret is not to the point. I can happily admit to feeling regret at the demise of Stalinism. The end of Stalinism is the end of an era that characterised the first thirty years of my life. I regret the end of Stalinism as I regret the passing of time generally, though I do not believe that Stalinism is the best form of government. What does seem relevant in assessing whether Sims really believes that Stalinism is the best form of government is how she would behave if faced with a decision whose rationality depended on whether or not it is. If she could press a button which would make Stalinism the general form of government, would she press it? Admittedly the world in which she has such a decision to make is not a close possible world. But what this shows is that the relevance of alternative possibilities in assessing beliefs is not a function of their closeness.

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V Individuation of Beliefs I am arguing that you believe a proposition, p, if and only if the way you are disposed to behave is governed by a version of practical rationality that works on the assumption, p. If working on the assumption, p, is equivalent to working on the assumption, q, in your way of behaving, then believing p is the same as believing q. And if there is a difference in how these two assumptions function in your way of behaving, then in believing them both you have two separate beliefs. Beliefs are individuated by their inferential roles in the version of rationality that the believer’s way of behaving is governed by. One apparent difficulty for the behaviourist account concerns beliefs in necessary truths and in inconsistent propositions. Believing that 2  2
4 is not the same as believing that 3  3
6, since you can believe one without believing the other. If this is hard to accept just think of more difficult sums. Yet these two assumptions seem to have the same role in any pattern of inferences. The same set of propositions follows from each of them, since all and only necessary truths follow from necessary truths. Equally, believing that 2  2
5 is not the same as believing that 3  3
5, yet the same propositions follow from each of these assumptions, since every single proposition follows from an inconsistent proposition. According to this argument, the disposition to behave on the assumption that 2  2
4 is the same as the disposition to behave on the assumption that 3  3
6. And, the disposition to behave on the assumption that 2  2
5 is the same as the disposition to behave on the assumption that 3  3
5. In classical logic no propositions but necessary truths follow from a necessary truth, and every proposition follows from a logically inconsistent proposition. It makes no difference as far as classical logical entailment is concerned which necessary truth or which inconsistent proposition is being considered. So every way of behaving works on the assumption that 2  2
4 and every way of behaving works on the assumption that 3  3
6. Neither assumption leads to any particular recommendations about behaviour. Also, no way of behaving works on the assumption that 2  2
5 and no way of behaving works on the assumption that 3  3
5. Since every proposition follows from a contradiction, given 2  2
5 you should jump over the moon and also you should not jump over the moon. No way of behaving can accommodate contradictory recommendations like that.

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Braithwaite, faced with this difficulty, limited his account to contingent beliefs – beliefs that could be either true or false. But this is unsatisfactory for two reasons. First, it is possible to believe both necessary truths and contradictions, and there is no fallacy of equivocation in saying that you believe these and also various contingent truths. The concept of belief is not ambiguous between its application to contingent propositions and its application to necessary and inconsistent propositions. The second reason that it is an unsatisfactory response to limit the account to contingent beliefs is that the same problem can arise for contingent beliefs. Believing that it is raining and 2  2
4 is not the same as believing that it is raining and 3  3
6, and it is not the same as just believing that it is raining. (Again if this seems unclear just use more difficult but true sums.) Yet if the assumption that 2  2
4 does not constrain a way of behaving in any way then these should all be the same belief. One response might be to abandon classical logic in favour of some sort of relevance logic.7 In relevance logic the allowable inferences must preserve some link between the premises and the conclusion; you cannot infer anything you like from a contradiction. But this suggestion is really too restrictive. The inferences of classical logic are inferences that a system of practical rationality ought to be able to avail itself of. The suggestion also fails to go far enough. The inferences sanctioned by relevance logic should not automatically be incorporated in any way of behaving. For it is possible to fail to make such inferences and end up believing one proposition but not another proposition that is logically entailed by it in relevance logic. The inferences that figure in a version of practical (or indeed theoretical) rationality are not the inferences of a deductive logic. They include what Sellars (1953) called ‘material inferences’. For example, we can infer from the fact that London is to the south-east of Oxford that Oxford is to the north-west of London. And they include practical inferences, like the inference from the fact that the car is filthy to the recommendation that I shall clean it. Every particular version of practical rationality can be described by a sort of logical system – a way of transforming one set of propositions into another. But the logical system will be as peculiar and as temporary as that particular version of practical rationality’s structure of recommendations at that particular time. The real reason that you can believe one inconsistent (or necessary) proposition and disbelieve another is that the version of practical

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rationality that your way of behaving is governed by may miss certain inferences that it ought to make. You can behave in a way that works on one assumption but fails to work on the assumption of some proposition that follows logically from it. Such a way of behaving is unstable and the version of practical rationality that it is governed by is changing and in the course of time will tend to change away from the one that fails to make simple logical inferences. Assuming that 2  2
5 and that 5 is an odd number it follows immediately that 2  2
an odd number. But assuming that 3  3
5 and that 5 is an odd number it does not immediately follow that 2  2
an odd number, although it does after a couple more moves. After a couple more moves, the way of behaving given that 2  2
5 breaks down as a way of behaving, and has to change itself. Although it may yield some results straightaway, it will have to change itself when it is faced with a situation in which the contradiction means that no recommendation is possible. There is a version of rationality that works on the assumption that 2  2
5, but it is an unstable version. Given this version of rationality you should charge £5 to someone who buys one thing costing £2 and another thing costing £2. When they regard the transaction as too expensive and decide to return one of the goods, you should give them back £2 and when they return the other good you should give them another £2. When they count out the number of pounds you have given them to be only four and demand another pound, your version of rationality recommends both that you should give them another pound and that you should not. It fails to come up with a practical recommendation for this situation, and in order to do so must change itself to a version that does not work on the assumption that 2  2
5. So in certain circumstances this version of rationality does come up with recommendations and these will differ from the recommendations that a version of rationality working on the assumption that 3  3
5 will come up with in the same circumstances. And in certain other circumstances what this version of rationality will recommend is that it changes, so that it no longer works on the assumption that 2  2
5. This is possible give the dynamic version of rationality outlined in Chapter 6. In the same way there are versions of rationality that work on the assumption that 2  2
4 that work differently from otherwise identical versions of rationality that work on the assumption that 3  3
6. Most of us behave in ways that are rational given both assumptions.

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But being disposed to behave in one of the ways that is rational on one assumption is not the same as being disposed to behave in one of the ways that is rational on the other assumption. For there are ways of behaving that work on one of these assumptions but not the other. In other words there are versions of rationality that make one but not the other assumption. As before, these versions will be unstable, but given a dynamic version of rationality this does not make them unreal. On my behaviourist conception of belief, it is possible to believe one proposition without believing the other if there is a way of behaving that works on the assumption of one of the propositions but not on the other. This in turn means that there is a version of rationality that works with one assumption but not the other. If this version is very unstable, then it may not be possible to have one belief without the other for very long without needing to change one’s beliefs. But as long as there is some possible situation in which the version of rationality that assumes one but not both propositions yields a different recommendation from the version that assumes both then we can make sense of them as different versions of rationality, even if the difference is only temporary. A common objection to an account of the mind that has a constitutive role for rationality is that such an account does not respect the great possibilities for irrationality in the human mind. But conceiving of rationality as dynamic allows a version of rationality to incorporate irrationality for as long as that irrationality does not stop that version from coming out with recommendations. Once a situation is faced in which the irrationality means that the version of rationality actually breaks down, then things must change. But as examples of self-deception and weakness of will make clear, it is often possible to keep an irrational version of rationality away from such situations for quite a long time. Suppose I am two months away from the deadline for a book contract and I haven’t yet started writing the book, and suppose I believe both these things and that I am not capable of writing a book in less than a year at the very least. Suppose also that the right thing to do if you are going to miss a deadline is to contact the publisher in plenty of time (at least two months in advance) and negotiate a new deadline, and suppose I believe this too. I’m distinctly frightened of confronting my publisher with a second successive failure to get the book written on time, but I believe that this sort of fear is not a good reason to avoid doing something I should otherwise do. All these beliefs are manifested in dispositions to behave. In particular I am disposed to

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assert each of these things if faced with a situation in which an honest answer is required. So I believe the following things: that such a book will take me a year to write; that I have two months left to write it; that two months is less than a year. But here is the problem: I also believe that I will get it done on time. If asked whether I need to have a chat with the publisher, I say I don’t need to; everything is under control. I am disposed to behave in a way that works on the assumption that I will get the book done on time. There is a very simple inference that I fail to make, and that failure seems to be motivated by some underlying anxiety. I may have to work hard to avoid making the inference. If I am in danger of meeting the publisher at some occasion we are both invited to I will find an excuse not to attend. I am avoiding having to answer the question: what would you say to your publisher? Having to answer that question would force me to make the inference I am resisting. Generally I behave extremely defensively if anyone brings up such a question and make it very uncomfortable for that person to continue the conversation. I successfully avoid not only the situation in which I have to talk to my publisher, but also any situation in which I might have to work out what I should do if I did. By avoiding situations in which I am faced with a question that will only be answered by a direct contradiction, I can continue to behave in a way that is governed by a version of rationality that assumes an inconsistent set of propositions. However, if a version of rationality both recommends that I should do something and simultaneously that I should not do it, then that is no recommendation at all. It is impossible to behave in a way that is governed by directly contradictory recommendations. There is an apparent counterexample to this principle, which derives from Saul Kripke (1979). Suppose that Peter knows a bit about Paderewski, the concert pianist, and believes him to have musical talent. But suppose Peter also knows a bit about Paderewski, the Polish statesman, and believes him to have no musical talent. Peter does not realise that these are one and the same man. Peter seems to be dipping twice into the linguistic practice of using the name Paderewski, without realising that he is dipping into the same practice each time. We seem to have a puzzle about belief here if it is right to describe Peter as simultaneously believing that Paderewski has musical talent and believing that Paderewski has no musical talent. This would involve Peter in having directly contradictory beliefs, and yet his mistake does not seem to be a failure of rationality so much as a failure

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of knowledge. These contradictory beliefs would lead to contradictory recommendations for action. Faced with the question of whether to listen to a record of Paderewski playing the piano, Peter’s version of rationality would fail to come up with a proper recommendation. We can also make this puzzle into a problem concerning the individuation of beliefs by supposing that Peter changes his mind about Paderewski the pianist. Having heard him play, he judges that he has no musical talent after all. Now it looks as if Peter has two quite distinct beliefs that Paderewski has no musical talent – two beliefs with exactly the same content. This looks like a problem for my account. If we take it that there is just one proposition in play here – that Paderewski has no musical talent, then there should only be room for one fact that Peter’s way of behaving is working on this assumption. There is only one question whether Peter should listen to Paderewski playing the piano, and no scope for a version of practical rationality to answer it in two ways simultaneously. In fact it is not difficult to identify two propositions (and consequently two questions) here – the proposition that the Polish pianist called ‘Paderewski’ had no musical talent and the proposition that the Polish statesman called ‘Paderewski’ had no musical talent. Believing these two things can account for the way Peter behaves. There are two quite separate questions that might be asked: whether to listen to the Polish pianist called ‘Paderewski’ playing the piano; and whether to listen to the Polish statesman called ‘Paderewski’ playing the piano. And we can avoid the problem of two beliefs with the same content just by denying that Peter has the further belief that Paderewski had no musical talent. The version of practical rationality that Peter’s way of behaving is governed by fails to make any recommendations about whether to listen to Paderewski playing the piano. His way of behaving can only be said to be governed by a version of practical rationality that works on the assumption that Paderewski had no musical talent if it has proper sensitivity to the linguistic practice involving that name. Oddly, Peter could be said to have beliefs about Paderewski if he knew rather less and had only encountered him through one or other of the channels. But having encountered him through both channels and mistakenly taken these channels to pick out different people, he cannot be said to have any beliefs about Paderewski. Another awkward issue for any account of belief is the distinction between de re and de dicto belief. Consider the proposition that Marie believes that the first prime minister of India was a woman. The

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proposition is taken to be ambiguous between the following possible readings. Marie believes of Pandit Nehru that he was a woman. And Marie believes it is true that India’s first prime minister was a woman. The first of these is a de re belief and the second is a de dicto belief. In order to have the de re belief Marie need not know that Nehru was prime minister; but she must have the strange belief that he was a woman. In order to have the de dicto belief, Marie must assent to the proposition as a whole, which only requires her to have the mistaken belief that Nehru’s daughter, Indira Ghandi, was the first Indian prime minister. There are plenty of different philosophical accounts of how to treat this distinction. But it does not look as if the word ‘belief’ is ambiguous between the two readings. Instead, it looks as if Marie believes two quite different things when she believes of India’s first prime minister that he was a woman, and when she believes it to be true that India’s first prime minister was a woman. The ambiguity seems to be a scope ambiguity. The behaviourist account allows this scope ambiguity. For there is a difference between being disposed to act in a way that makes the assumption of India’s first prime minister that he was a woman and being disposed to act in a way that makes the assumption that India’s first prime minister was a woman. Making the assumption that India’s first prime minister was a woman, it may be rational to conclude that Indira Ghandi, who may be known to be India’s only female prime minister, was the first prime minister. Making the assumption of India’s first prime minister that he was a woman, it may be rational to conclude that he was a brilliant male impersonator, if one also knows that he looked very like a man.

Notes 1. It is also worth observing that Ramsey himself ([1926] 1978: 75) thought that the axioms of his decision theory were probably false of actual human psychology, though a useful approximation. 2. The distinction between believing a proposition and judging a proposition to be true is no doubt a significant one, but not one that can be made just by introducing the requirement that in making a judgement a proposition is entertained. See section IV of this chapter. 3. It is very important to be clear that believing you will catch the train is not the same as believing that the probability of catching the train is 1 (or of believing with degree 1 that you will catch the train).

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4. See Wittgenstein (1958: 308 and 589). 5. See Moore (1993: 207–12), but the central source for Moore’s paradox is Wittgenstein (1958: part II, section x). 6. See for example Lycan (1986) for a discussion of these distinctions, and a rejection of his earlier view that judgement is a form of belief. 7. See for example Anderson and Belnap (1975).

8

Intentions

I Intentions as States of Mind that Cause Behaviour According to the behaviourist model I have been developing, to describe someone’s state of mind is to describe the version of practical rationality that the person’s way of behaving is governed by. So the idea of my intending to achieve goal G, and therefore of my behaviour being directed to G, may be spelt out by saying that I am disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that unconditionally recommends that G is to be achieved. Suppose that your way of behaving is characterised by a version of practical rationality that recommends that going for a walk is the thing to do if the sun is shining. This version of practical rationality is variable with respect to the answer to the question of whether the sun is shining. The recommendation to go for a walk is a conditional one. And suppose the sun is shining and your way of behaving has properly adapted to this. Then your way of behaving may be characterised for the time being by another more restrictive version of practical rationality – one that unconditionally recommends that going for a walk is the thing to do. If your behaviour is governed by such a version of practical rationality then going for a walk is your goal. Your way of behaving is directed to this goal. What is the best way of achieving that goal in the circumstances (according to your version of practical rationality) will be recommended. This is what it means to say that you intend to go for a walk. This theory can be illustrated using the familiar example of the doctrine of double effect, according to which it is sometimes permissible to bring about a result as a foreseeable but not intended consequence of your action even when it is not permissible to bring about the same result as the intended result of your action. For example, a doctor may prescribe a massive dose of morphine to a dying patient in order to ease the person’s pain and knowing that it will probably

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kill him or her. According to the doctrine of double effect that doctor is in a better moral position than the doctor who prescribes some other drug that will also probably kill the patient but is not a painkiller. For the first doctor the death of the patient is an unintended but foreseen consequence, and for the second doctor it is the intended consequence. The doctrine of double effect is disreputable partly because it opens the way to so much humbug. The moral is that if you are a doctor who wants to commit an act of euthanasia you should be careful to do it in such a way that your primary intention may appear to be something else. And this now looks as though the doctor who employs the doctrine of double effect is just hiding behind a phoney distinction. But the fact that the distinction between intended consequence and unintended but foreseen consequence may be easily faked does not show it to be a false distinction. Gilbert Harman (1986) describes a situation in which two air bombers each bomb a factory in which are hiding hundreds of civilians, and they both know the civilians are there. One of them is a terror bomber who intends to kill the civilians in order to create an atmosphere of terror in the enemy ranks and thus further his ends. The other is a tactical bomber who intends only to bomb the factory thus damaging the enemy’s war effort and regards the slaughter of the civilians as a regrettable but inevitable consequence. Both bombers non-accidentally kill the civilians. And we tend to think that there is not much moral difference between the two, notwithstanding the doctrine of double effect. The tactical bomber is not blameless for the deaths of the civilians just because he did not set out to kill them. In this case, knowing that his bomb will kill the civilians is enough to make him responsible for that consequence. But even if there is little moral difference between the two bombers, there is a difference in their intentions. And this may be brought out by considering what their behaviour is sensitive to. Suppose the civilians were not hiding in the factory but in a disused warehouse two miles down the road. The terror bomber would have bombed the warehouse, while the tactical bomber would still have bombed the factory. Their versions of practical rationality involve different commitments even though these differences do not show up in the actual bits of behaviour that each produce. The tactical bomber’s way of behaving is not governed by a version of practical rationality that recommends that the civilians are to be killed. So he does not intend to kill them, according to this behaviourist account. The terror

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bomber’s way of behaving is governed by such a version; so he does intend to kill them. The only real difference between the two bombers that could account for the fact that one does and the other does not intend to kill the civilians is in the adaptability of their respective ways of behaving to the requirements of that goal. And this difference in adaptability reflects a difference in the causal mechanism that results in each piece of behaviour. Intending to kill the civilians, the terror bomber is in a different state prior to his bombing behaviour than the tactical bomber, who has no such intention. This account, in which having an intention is a real causally relevant state of the agent, is at odds with an anti-realist strand in behaviouristic approaches to intention. According to this strand, when we say that someone has a certain intention we are not describing the person’s state of mind at all. We are just locating that person’s behaviour in the context of a reason for the action. In declaring his intention in raising his arm, the driver is explaining what he is doing and he is explaining what he is doing, i.e. that he is signalling, by directing attention to the context in which the raising of his arm is understood as signalling. (Melden 1961: 99)

My task in this section is to neutralise this kind of anti-realism about intentions. As well as deriving from an overenthusiastic reading of Wittgenstein, it may have its roots in Ryle’s sarcastic attack on what he calls ‘The Myth of Volitions’ (1949: 62–9). This ‘myth’ is exemplified by some things Descartes writes, especially in The Passions of the Soul, though Descartes’ views here are so odd that it is certainly worth questioning whether the ‘myth’ is as widespread as Ryle takes it to be. Our merely willing to walk has the consequence that our legs move and we walk. (Passions of the Soul, section 18) And the activity of the soul consists entirely in the fact that simply by willing something it brings it about that the little gland to which it is closely joined moves in the manner required to produce the effect corresponding to the volition. (Passions of the Soul, section 42)

Ryle of course rejects the dualism he sees in this picture, whereby volitions exist in a purely mental realm and then cause things to happen in a purely physical realm. But this dualistic aspect to the myth of volitions can be easily detached from the picture. So can the idea that in order to act voluntarily you have to do something else – perform a volition – that then causes the action to happen.

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Reading Descartes, one gets a picture of an agent being engaged in action at one remove from the body’s engagement in action. The real action happens in the mind in the process of willing, and then the body moves mechanically as a result of this initial mental act. The body is like a puppet that moves in response to its strings being pulled by the will. This picture, which emerges naturally from a strong dualism of mind and body, is very easy to ridicule. It is absurd to think that we have to do some prior mental act in order to get our bodies moving. I imagine that when people recovering from a muscle paralysis start to regain control over their movements, they perform acts of will, perhaps accompanied by exhortations, ‘Come on, foot; move!’ and as a result the foot moves. But ordinary action is very unlike this. Other philosophers also talk of the special faculty of the will, talk which Ryle rejects. But it is not so clear that all such talk is shown to be absurd in the same way by Ryle’s attack on the Myth of Volitions. For example, John Locke writes in a much more Aristotelian vein as follows: This power which the mind has to . . . prefer the motion of any part of the body to its rest, and vice-versa, in any particular instance, is that which we call the will. The actual exercise of that power, by directing any particular action, or its forbearance, is that which we call volition or willing. (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, chapter 21, section 5)

We can suppose that such exercises of the will take place in just the same world as do actions themselves. Indeed, we might even suppose that exercises of the will are actions.1 There is no commitment to the picture of action as puppeteering here. Identifying volitions with actions would sidestep another of Ryle’s arguments against the Myth of Volitions – that it leads to an infinite regress. If volitions, which according to the myth must be posited to explain the voluntariness of actions, are themselves supposed to be voluntary acts of will, then they themselves must require prior volitions to account for their status as voluntary acts. And these must be preceded by prior volitions ad infinitum. This idea is sidestepped by denying that volitions must be prior to actions. However, one of the reasons for talking about volitions in the first place is to explain the nature of voluntary or intentional action. Volitions are no longer doing any useful work in a philosophical account of intentional action if they are to be understood as themselves being the actions. The sort of account that philosophers have usually

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looked for here is a causal account of intentional action whereby some piece of bodily activity counts as intentional action or part of an intentional action in virtue of being caused in some appropriate way by some characteristic mental entity. The job of explaining agency then gets shifted to the task of characterising this mental entity combined with the task of explaining the appropriate sort of causation. And philosophical progress is supposed to have been made thereby. So the mental entity better be something other than the action itself. One way to get such an explanatory account without taking volitions to be ghostly mental acts pulling or pushing the body into action is to take the characteristic mental cause to be a state not an act. In particular, intentionally achieving some result is taken to require the achievement of that result to be caused (in some appropriate way) by the state of intending to achieve it. Now the image of action as a body being pushed around by a mind may still be hovering about here. This is because causes – even causes that are states – are usually taken to be what I called in Chapter 4 input causes not framework causes. An input cause feeds into a framework cause to yield a result. If the state of intending to achieve some result is taken to be an input cause, then it feeds into some mechanism, which produces the action. This mechanism is a mechanism for transforming mental states into physical actions. The mental part of acting and the bit in which the body moves are taken to be quite separate, and, as with the puppeteering model, this means that we must think of the agent as doing his or her work before the body gets going. Only by being clear that the agent’s state of intending some result is a framework cause can we avoid this. As a framework cause the mental state is identified with the presence of a mechanism that transforms situations into behaviour. So the mental part of the process of acting – the part that involves agency as such – is present while things are being achieved in the world, and is determining those achievements. The agent’s involvement does not result in something that causally precedes the body’s involvement on this model. Instead the agent’s involvement – the framework cause – results directly in the body moving. This is the case whether we are talking about a prior intention or an intention in action – one with which the agent is acting. My intending to paint the bathroom ceiling this weekend is a prior intention – directed to a future goal. But when I am in the process of painting the bathroom ceiling intentionally I am also intending to paint the bathroom ceiling, and this is an intention with which I act.

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One might think, given this distinction, that what should figure in a causal theory of action are prior intentions rather than intentions with which one acts, because the intentions with which one acts, being present at the same time as the action, cannot be regarded as causally prior. But this cannot be right since prior intentions are not always (or even usually) present when someone acts intentionally. As I swerve the car to avoid a pedestrian I intend to swerve the car, but I did not intend to swerve it before I did it. The moment I started intending to swerve the car was the moment I started swerving the car. The mistake here is to assume that intentions with which one acts, because they are not temporally prior, cannot be causally prior to behaviour. Framework causes always exist at the same time as the events they result in. When the gravitational mechanism causes a stone to fall, the gravitational mechanism is present as the stone falls. When the mechanism of ageing causes my hair to turn grey, the mechanism is still present as my hair greys. Likewise, when the mechanism of behaving in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that has painting my bathroom ceiling as a goal causes me to wield a paintbrush, that mechanism is present at the same time as the behaviour it results in. Intentions with which one acts are dispositions to behave, just as prior intentions are. Indeed, I want to argue that intentions with which one acts and prior intentions are not different sorts of states; they are the same sort of state but have different sorts of goals – one has a present goal and the other has a future goal. Just as there are not two sorts of belief – dispositional and occurrent – there are not two sorts of intention. Intending is being disposed to behave in a certain sort of way. When you are in the process of acting that way you are realising that disposition. Saying that there are two kinds of intention is like saying that sugar has two different kinds of solubility – prior solubility before it gets into contact with water and solubility in action when it is in the process of dissolving. But sugar’s disposition to dissolve is the same state before and during the process of dissolving. However, it does seem a bit odd to think of those intentions with which one acts that are not preceded by prior intentions as being dispositions. Consider again my swerving the car to avoid a pedestrian. I had the intention to avoid the pedestrian, but not before I started acting. The intention and the behaviour came into being simultaneously. This seems odd because it is odd for a disposition only to exist

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when it is being realised. It is like a piece of sugar only becoming soluble when it is placed in water. A disposition that only exists when realised looks like a very different sort of thing from a disposition that exists prior to being realised. Indeed, it does not sound like much of a disposition at all. But the oddness of thinking of intentions with which one acts as dispositions is only apparent. The point is that these are intentions to achieve results now. The intention I have when I move to the side to give the oncoming vehicle more room is to move into the side now. Being disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that recommends that I am to move into the side now is to be in the process of acting. It is to be such that if turning the steering wheel a bit to the left now is what achieves that goal then turning the steering wheel a bit to the left is what results. This does not mean that prior intentions are somehow inert until their time comes. I might intend to buy someone a really nice present for his or her birthday next month. The goal is to be achieved next month. But having the intention now means that I am already in the process of achieving that goal. It is quite likely that nothing is required right now in order to achieve that future goal. But if I need to take on some extra work in order to afford the present and I need to act now in order to take on this extra work, then having the intention means I will be acting now. Perhaps I know that my memory is not great and I write a note for myself in next month’s calendar. Prior intentions are not just dormant states. They are not just intentions with which one acts whose time has not yet come. For both prior intentions and intentions with which one acts, having the intention to achieve G is being in the process of acting with the achievement of G as a goal. The only difference is that for intentions with which one acts G is specified in terms of something happening now. If we assume that the agent’s state of intending to do something is a framework cause of that person’s doing it we can accept also that prior to the agent doing it there must usually be an event or act of the agent getting into that state – his or her forming the intention or deciding to do it. But this prior event should not be treated as a mental act which pushes or pulls the body into action like a puppet. It is an event or act that sets up the process of acting. It primes the mechanism of goal-directed action (i.e. the will) by establishing the goal. Then when the mechanism is realised in action (the will is exercised) the goal gets achieved. Nothing in Ryle’s attack on the Myth of Volitions threatens this picture.

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As I argued in Chapter 4, the real target of Ryle’s attack should not have been the assumption of mental entities as causes of action, but the assumption of mental entities as input causes. Since Ryle (as I have suggested) did not see the full point of the distinction between input causes and framework causes, he attacked the view that beliefs and intentions are genuinely states of a person – states whose existence helps causally to explain the person’s behaviour. I want to develop the opposing position – one I am happy to describe as behaviourist – that beliefs and intentions are dispositional states of a person. The first thing to say is that using the term ‘intention’ in the normal way and not as a philosophical term of art, it seems that intentions are not states of mind; they belong to quite a different grammatical category. The intention someone has is what that person intends. If I intend to paint the bathroom ceiling this weekend then my intention is to paint the bathroom ceiling this weekend. Such a thing is my goal; it is not my state. My state is that of intending to paint the bathroom ceiling; it is not simply to paint the bathroom ceiling. Perhaps the case is not quite this clear-cut. We do describe an intention as wavering, for instance. And here the thing we are describing as wavering is not the goal but the state of intending that goal. So it seems that the word ‘intention’ is really ambiguous. This can be brought out by observing that it sounds like a pun to say that my intention is to paint the bathroom ceiling this weekend and it is wavering. To avoid problems I will adopt explicitly the usual convention adopted implicitly by philosophers working in this area of taking intentions to be states of intending. The anti-realist argument considered in the previous chapter concerning beliefs might also be applied to prior intentions, and with just as little effect. Saying that I believe that King Henry VIII had six wives is communicating nothing more than saying that King Henry VIII had six wives. Does it follow that in saying that I believe it I am not describing my state? No; for even in just saying that King Henry VIII had six wives I am communicating the fact that I am in the state of believing it. The pragmatic similarity between the assertion that he had six wives and the assertion that I believe he had six wives does not mean that the two assertions are describing the same thing. In just the same way it might be argued that when I state my intention to paint the bathroom ceiling this weekend I can do it either by saying that I will paint the ceiling this weekend or by saying that I intend to paint the ceiling this weekend. Does it follow that the

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latter statement does not describe my state? No. Both assertions communicate the fact that I intend to paint the ceiling. The second one does it by stating that fact. Though it functions pragmatically much like the first assertion that does not describe my state, this does not mean that it does not describe my state. So the pragmatics of our talk of prior intentions does not rule out the natural assumption that prior intentions are indeed states of a person – mental states. What about the pragmatics of our talk of intentions with which one acts? Davidson (1980: 8) in his early article, ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’ wrote: ‘The expression “the intention with which James went to church” has the outward form of a description, but it is in fact syncategorematic and cannot be taken to refer to an entity, state, disposition, or event.’ According to Davidson, in saying that James was acting with a certain intention one is not saying that some entity called an intention was causing James’ behaviour; one is just saying that James’ behaviour was caused by a reason. The reason for his behaviour was the desire to achieve something combined with the belief that what he was doing was achieving that thing. As with other anti-realist arguments I have considered, the observation that an expression with the outward form of a certain description has as one of its pragmatic roles something less than that of description does not mean that the expression does not at the same time have the pragmatic role of that description. The correct observation that talk of acting with an intention commits you initially to something other than the existence of a real causally prior state of intending does not mean that it does not also commit you to that. So, initially, saying that James went to church with the intention of impressing his neighbours commits you to the claim that James’ reasons for going to church are reasons by reference to the goal of impressing his neighbours. But when you work this initial commitment through the general account of agency that I have been developing, you get the further commitment to James being in a dispositional state characterised by sensitivity to a version of practical rationality in which impressing his neighbours is a goal. And this is simply the commitment to James intending to impress his neighbours. So, although Davidson’s analysis of acting with an intention does not appear at first to involve the positing of a causally prior state of intending, when the implications of his analysis are worked out it does after all require the existence of such a state. In fact Davidson (1980: essay 5) changed his mind on the question of whether intentional action requires the existence of a special state

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of mind – an intention. He wanted, quite rightly as I have argued, a unified account of intentions with which one acts and prior intentions. He developed an account of prior intentions as judgements of a certain sort. So the intentions with which one acts had to be judgements of that sort too.

II Intention and Belief In Davidson’s newer account of intention, an intention to do some action is identified with the unconditional judgement that that action is desirable. By ‘unconditional’ judgement, he means that the desirability of the action is not taken to be relative to or conditional on any reasons. This is by contrast with, for example, the judgement that with respect to its satisfying some particular condition (or indeed all relevant conditions) this action is desirable. When Davidson identifies an intention with a judgement this is misleading. If we think of a judgement as belonging to a different category from a belief – perhaps as something a belief is a disposition to make – then an intention does not belong to the same category as a judgement. An intention is not something we make; it is something we have, like a belief. Intending, like believing, is being disposed to behave in certain ways. But Davidson uses the word ‘judgement’ pretty loosely to mean something like ‘holding’, and accepts that judgements for him are dispositions, just as beliefs are.2 Possibly Davidson was identifying the making of a certain kind of judgement with the forming of an intention. So the decision to act in a certain way might be taken to be the making of a certain judgement. And this would make some sense of Davidson’s (1980: 97–9) consideration of the possibility that intentions with which one acts are sometimes identical with the action. Strictly speaking, an action – doing something – belongs to quite a different grammatical category from the having of an intention. But doing something might, without risk of grammatical confusion, be identified with deciding to do something, and equally with judging that that is the thing to do. Talking of desirability is also rather misleading. I may not think that it is very desirable to clean the gunge out of the U-tube under my sink, even though I intend to do that. But again Davidson does not really mean ‘desirable’ when he uses this word. He really means that the action is the one to do. So making the unconditional judgement that some result is most desirable amounts to something like holding that the result is the one to achieve.

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It is an interesting question whether such a judgement might qualify as being a belief since we might think that beliefs, unlike intentions, must have objective truth conditions. We cannot take the proposition that the goal, G, is to be achieved out of the context of the particular agent’s version of practical rationality and consider whether or not it is really the case that G is to be achieved. If I intend to go to the seaside next weekend, then my way of behaving is governed by a version of practical rationality according to which my going to the seaside next weekend is to be achieved. But this goal cannot be taken out and assessed as true or false independently of my version of practical rationality. Coming back to my account of belief, outlined in the previous chapter, believing that A is the thing to do would be identified with being disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality which works on the assumption that A is the thing to do. And there is a difference between talking about a version of practical rationality that recommends that G is to be achieved and talking about a version of practical rationality that works on the assumption that G is to be achieved. The former is the basis of my account of intention. Being disposed to act in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that recommends that G is to be achieved is not quite the same as believing that G is to be achieved. My intention to go to the seaside next weekend should be carefully distinguished from some closely related beliefs. For example, I might believe that given my version of practical rationality, going to the seaside is the goal to be achieved. This belief may be assessed as true or false independently of that version of practical rationality. It may be objectively judged that given my version of practical rationality this goal is not to be achieved, and my belief is false. Similarly a goal might be explicitly relativised to rationality as a whole. For example, I might believe that the rational thing to do is to go to the seaside this weekend. The truth or falsity of this belief too seems to transcend any particular version of rationality. If rationality is dynamic in the way suggested in Chapter 6, then it makes sense to contrast what is to be achieved in a particular version of rationality at a time with what is to be achieved according to practical rationality ultimately. The belief about what is to be achieved according to practical rationality ultimately may be formulated as the belief that I should go to the seaside this weekend.3 There is a difference in English between saying, ‘I shall go to the seaside,’ and saying, ‘I will go to the seaside.’ ‘I shall go,’ is an

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expression of intent. ‘I will go,’ is a statement of fact about the future. The difference between them is a pragmatic one. ‘I shall go,’ does not have truth conditions; it makes no sense to complain that what was said was false. It expresses the fact that going to the seaside is the goal that means-ends rationality must work towards achieving. Working on the assumption that I will go to the seaside is to take the truth of the proposition that I will go to the seaside as a premise in working out other behaviour, not just the behaviour that is required to get to the seaside. The two expressions are associated with different versions of practical rationality. If a version of practical rationality works on the assumption that I will go to the seaside next weekend then it may yield the recommendation that I should cancel the meeting I had arranged at home for the same time. If a version of practical rationality recommends that I shall go to the seaside next weekend, then it may yield the recommendation that I should fill the car with petrol in preparation. (Perhaps we should assume that there is to be a petrol strike next weekend, so that it makes sense to fill up the car in advance.) Having as my goal that I am to go to the seaside usually makes it reasonable also to work on the assumption that I will go to the seaside. But there are apparent exceptions to this. For example, I may intend to go, but strongly believe that I won’t get away with it and will be forced to fulfil my promise to do something about the garden. I hope the promise will be forgotten, and I fill up the car with petrol in preparation, but I do not really believe it will be forgotten. So I do not cancel the meeting I had arranged at home for the weekend. I work on the assumption that I will not go to the seaside while, at the same time, having as my goal that I am to go to the seaside. Another example familiar in the philosophy of action literature is intending to hit the bull’s-eye on a dartboard while believing that you will probably miss. Your way of behaving is governed by a version of practical rationality that recommends that you are to hit the bull’s eye. This version of rationality recommends that you line up your dart in a certain way and so on. But at the same time this same version of practical rationality works on the assumption that you will miss and so you should not start spending the prize money just yet. Perhaps you are not really intending to hit the bull’s eye, but only intending to take your best shot at the bull’s eye. But this suggestion has the odd consequence that you will have succeeded with your action even when you miss the bull’s eye. More plausible might be the response that you do not really believe that you will miss the bull’s

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eye. You just believe that you will probably miss it. I do not really believe that I will not go to the seaside, otherwise there would be no point in filling up the car with petrol. I believe that I will probably not go. This is compatible with having as my goal that I am to go, and doing various preparations as long as they do not cost me too much. So it may be quite rational to intend to achieve some goal while believing that one probably will not succeed. However, it does not seem to be possible to intend to achieve a result and at the same time to believe that it is absolutely impossible that one will achieve it. The way practical rationality determines the means to achieve its ends involves a circular process involving a renegotiation of goals as described in Chapter 6, section I. If there is no possible means to achieve an end, it is a feature of this process that the end must be reconsidered.

III Intention and Commitment This behaviourist account is broadly compatible with the approach that gets most widespread philosophical support these days, which is to think of intentions in terms of commitments.4 Carlos Moya states that his proposal ‘is that in having an intention I commit myself either to make . . . or to try to make . . . its content true’.5 In the weak sense of commitment I described in the previous chapter, being governed by a version of practical rationality that recommends that G is to be achieved is to be committed to the achievement of G. It is to be in a state that has implications for how you are to behave. Unlike the state of commitment you are in when you have made a promise for example, you are entitled to change this state to one in which you are not to achieve G without any qualms. But as long as you are in the state of being disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that recommends that G is to be achieved, then you should act to achieve G. Given this weak conception of a commitment, there is no need for Moya’s qualification ‘or try to make’. Indeed I think it is a mistake. You can act in a way that is committed to hitting the bull’s eye, even though you do not believe it very likely that you will succeed. Making this sort of commitment does not carry with it any acceptance that you deserve to be punished in some way if you fail to satisfy the commitment. But what it does mean is that missing the bull’s eye counts as a failure. If intending to hit the bull’s eye only involved the commitment to hit it or at least to try to hit it, as Moya claims, then in

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trying and missing you have done what you should have done. But in fact, trying and missing involves failing to meet the commitment implicit in the intention. Robert Brandom, in his book Making It Explicit, develops a highly worked-out account of practical commitment, in which intending to achieve a goal is taken to be equivalent to acknowledging the commitment to achieve that goal.6 He argues that we can have commitments that we do not acknowledge. For example, in making a verbal agreement I commit myself to that agreement, but might have no intention of keeping to it. In this case I do not acknowledge the commitment I have. Alternatively, in committing myself to go to the seaside next weekend I might thereby commit myself to missing an appointment I have arranged at home. But I might not acknowledge that second commitment, even though I have it. So, according to Brandom, having an intention does not just involve having a commitment, it involves acknowledging the commitment. This notion of acknowledging a commitment corresponds in my behaviourist account by the idea of being disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that includes that commitment. So I might put myself into a situation in which I am to act in a certain way, perhaps to keep a verbal agreement I have just made, but not be sensitive to this in the way I behave. The example of intending to go to the seaside next weekend while at the same time not intending to miss an appointment I have made at home for the same time is explained by the dynamic nature of practical rationality. It is possible for a version of practical rationality to recommend that I am to go to the seaside next weekend and at the same time to recommend that I am to attend an appointment at home next weekend. This is like the example of believing that 2  2
5 discussed in the previous chapter. So long as I am not faced with a problem in which the recommendations based on these two assumptions come into contradiction, the version of practical rationality can continue for a while making recommendations. I can prepare for both things simultaneously. However, if I am asked a direct question, ‘Where will you be next weekend?’ the version of practical rationality that makes both recommendations will break down and need to develop into a less self-contradictory one. Perhaps this will be the version that works on the assumption that I will have to miss my appointment. It is true that in a sense I was already committed to this new version of practical rationality by working on the assumption that I was to go to the

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seaside next weekend. But my behaviour was not governed by it. This is what I take my failure to acknowledge the commitment to amount to. So my account of intentions corresponds with Brandom’s except it provides a behaviourist account of what is involved in acknowledging a structure of commitments. Since intention is like belief in that it involves the subject in a commitment, one would expect a version of Moore’s paradox to apply to intention too. The parallel paradox for intention would be someone saying, ‘I intend to go the seaside, but I shall not go.’ This does not work quite as well as Moore’s paradox, possibly because the phrase, ‘I shall not go,’ no longer has so clear a sense as it might once have done. To get a similar but clearer paradox of intention consider the Toxin Puzzle.7 Imagine you are offered a deal in which you will be given a million pounds if at midnight tonight you intend to drink some unpleasant but non-fatal toxin tomorrow morning. You have to have the intention tonight. But the intention concerns an action to be done tomorrow. For the deal to be enforceable we should also imagine that the person offering the deal is a mind reader, although all we really have to add is that you are a very honest person. Nothing could be easier it seems; the million pounds is yours. You would happily drink the bottle of toxin for a sum much less than a million pounds. And you do not even have to drink it, you only have to intend to drink it. So tomorrow morning, once you have already won the million pounds, you might as well throw the toxin down the sink. But there lies your problem. It seems that the rational thing for you to do is to intend tonight to drink the toxin in the morning and then change your mind in the morning. But however rational this sounds, it is impossible. You cannot intend to do something and at the same time plan not to. And now that you know that you are entirely at liberty to change your mind, you cannot intend to drink the toxin at all, since you know you will change your mind once you have the money. The liberty to change your mind has made it extremely difficult for you to win the million pounds. But why is it literally impossible to have an intention at the same time as knowing that you will change that intention? The answer, as with Moore’s paradox about belief, is that having an intention is not simply a matter of finding some independently identifiable psychological entity in one’s mind. It is a matter of being under some commitment. This does not mean that having an intention is not being in

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a state of mind. It is being in a state of being committed in the way you behave to a certain outcome. You cannot be committed in the way you behave to achieving one thing while knowing that you will change your mind, since knowing that you will change your mind involves being committed in the way you behave to the fact that you will not achieve it.

Notes 1. See Hornsby (1980) for the view that actions are identical to successful tryings, and hence to volitions in some sense. 2. See Davidson (1980: 97, footnote 7) and his reply to Peacocke in Vermazen and Hintikka (1985: 211). 3. I suspect that this ‘should’ is a moral ‘should’, but this is a further issue. 4. See Danto (1973), Aune (1977), Robins (1984), Bratman (1987). 5. (Moya 1990: 138). As I pointed out in the previous section, the content of an intention is not that the result is or has been achieved, and so it is a mistake for Moya to think that one tries to make the content of an intention true. The content of an intention is that the result is to be achieved, and, if anything, one is trying to make this false – i.e. one is trying to make it the case that the result is no longer to be achieved. 6. Brandom (1994: 253ff.). 7. Kavka (1983).

9

Knowledge

I Sensitivity to Facts In this chapter I am going to argue that the concept of knowledge simply falls out of the behaviourist model of the mind that I have outlined so far. I think that this is a big selling point. The traditional approach to the philosophy of knowledge has been to construct the concept of knowledge out of other, apparently better understood, elements like belief and justification. In this traditional approach, the philosophy of mind is relevant only in providing an account of belief. Then epistemology is supposed to be concerned with outlining the special relationship that belief must have with the objects of knowledge in order to count as knowledge. One trouble with the traditional approach is that it gives us no understanding of why we should turn out to have a concept of knowledge that corresponds to one such construction rather than to any other. The philosophical accounts are constructed in response to counterexamples that appeal to our actual internalised conception of what counts as knowledge, but they do not explain the fundamental role of our concept of knowledge. As a result, the accounts that emerge from the traditional approach have a degree of complexity that fails to reflect the apparent simplicity of our actual grasp of the concept of knowledge. The complexity by itself is perhaps not a problem; but there should at least be some indication in the traditional account of how it is that we can grasp the idea of knowledge so easily. By contrast with this approach, I do not start off by assuming that knowledge is a special kind of belief. Indeed, my account shares the central claim of Tim Williamson’s (2000) powerful approach to the philosophy of knowledge, which is that knowledge and belief are distinct states of mind. An account of the state of mind that is knowledge (and of its relationship with belief) emerges directly from the behaviourist model that I have already presented.

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In the behaviourist approach the traditional epistemological concern with justification is not treated as a concern with justified belief. It does not concern the special relationship between mind and world (i.e. between belief and its objects). Instead of this, it concerns the articulation and development of the abstract conception of practical rationality that an agent’s way of behaving is sensitive to. It is not until sections IV and V below where I consider a necessary complication to any version of practical rationality that a behaviour mechanism that actually works must be governed by, that the connection between knowledge and justification needs to be introduced at all. To begin with, here are some rough and ready conceptual truisms. To know something is to be open to it and sensitive to it; and this means that the thing that one knows must be somehow available to one. If I know that Fleming discovered penicillin then the fact that Fleming discovered penicillin is somehow available to me. In particular it is available to a version of practical rationality that governs the way I behave. To the extent that some recommendation of this version of practical rationality might now depend on whether or not Fleming discovered penicillin, the version of practical rationality will make that recommendation. And what this means in a nutshell is that the answer to the question of whether or not Fleming discovered penicillin is a non-redundant variable in a version of practical rationality that governs the way I am behaving. What it means to say that the variable is non-redundant is that different values of the variable will have different implications for what is recommended by the version of practical rationality, at least in some circumstances. Suppose that the answer to whether or not God existed had absolutely no implications for the way to behave; what you should do if today is Sunday and God exists is to go to church, and what you should do if today is Sunday and God does not exist is to go to church, and so on. Then we could include the answer to the question of whether God exists as a variable in our version of practical rationality without changing anything. But because the variable would be redundant it would not follow that we knew that God did/did not exist. So, if the answer to the question of whether Fleming discovered penicillin were no, and this answer had a certain implication for the way I should behave given the version of practical rationality that governs the way I do behave, then, given that everything is working properly, I would act accordingly. And if the answer is yes (as it is of course), and this answer had a certain other implication for the way

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I should behave, then I would behave accordingly. For example, if I had to answer the question in a quiz with a desirable prize, then I would answer accordingly. This is different from merely believing that Fleming discovered penicillin. For merely believing that Fleming discovered penicillin is working on the assumption that Fleming discovered penicillin. And this has the same set of implications for the way I should behave in the world in which Fleming did discover penicillin as it does in a world in which he did not. If someone’s way of behaving is governed by a version of practical rationality that works on the assumption that Fleming discovered penicillin, it may or may not at the same time be governed by a version of practical rationality that is variable with respect to the question of whether or not Fleming discovered penicillin. For example, that person’s way of behaving may work on the assumption that Fleming discovered penicillin even if he did not. In this case their way of behaving is certainly not sensitive to whether or not Fleming discovered penicillin. The person may be quite rigid with respect to this assumption. In this case, although the person believes that Fleming discovered penicillin, the fact that Fleming discovered penicillin is not really present or available to that person’s way of behaving. He or she does not know this fact. Knowledge is incompatible with such insensitivity. Only when you are disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that takes some fact as an input, can you be said to know that fact. Note a very important difference in the grammar of ‘knows’ and the grammar of ‘believes’. You know whether Fleming discovered penicillin. You do not believe whether Fleming discovered penicillin. With knowledge we are interested in the existence of a variable – the variable whether or not Fleming discovered penicillin – in the version of practical rationality that governs someone’s behaviour. With belief we are interested in the existence of an assumption – the assumption that Fleming discovered penicillin – in the version of practical rationality that governs someone’s behaviour. So here is the behaviourist account of knowledge: If a subject is disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that is itself sensitive to whether or not p then the subject may be said to know whether p.

As a shorthand version of the account I will usually just say that to know a fact is to be disposed to behave in a way that is sensitive to

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that fact.1 This sensitivity should be understood to be mediated by practical rationality. Consider the way of behaving that is making a cup of coffee. The goal is to have a cup of coffee. In the circumstances, the means to achieving that goal involves filling up the kettle at the tap, which itself involves a certain twisting movement with one hand on the tap while the other hand holds the kettle under it. We have here a version of rationality or at any rate a bit of such a version. It makes recommendations for my behaviour. If I behave in a way that is governed by these recommendations, then I may be said to know where the tap is, where the coffee pot is, how to turn the tap, how to make coffee, and so on. The inputs to such a version of rationality are facts, not beliefs. What matters in terms of what should be achieved is not where I believe the coffee is or what I believe is the way to turn a tap, but the facts about where the coffee is and how to turn a tap. This means that being governed by a version of practical rationality includes being sensitive to the way the world is as well as having the ability to move the right bits of one’s body. Action involves knowledge. Traditional philosophical accounts of knowledge and action explain knowledge in terms of internal mental states (beliefs) being arrived at in the right sort of way from the facts, and explain action in terms of behaviour being derived from internal states (beliefs and intentions) in the right sort of way. On the behaviourist view we can cut out the middleman and explain action in terms of behaviour being derived in the right sort of way from the facts. Knowledge may then be attributed in virtue of this model, as may beliefs and intentions. It is crucial to stress that something is known only if it is immediately available to your way of behaving. You do not know something if you have to go out and find it first, or if you have to work it out first. I do not at this moment know what 22 times 33 is, even though it would not take me very long to work it out. So the answer to the question of what 22 times 33 is is not immediately available for use by my behaviour mechanisms even though it is conditionally available. If I have to look in a few cupboards in order for the fact about the location of the sugar to be available as an input to my way of behaving then I do not yet know that fact. The point is that the version of rationality to which my behaviour is sensitive does not have a recommendation for action that depends on the fact about where the sugar is. This is so even though I may be disposed to behave in a way that becomes sensitive to where the sugar is, by looking for it. I shall consider this sort of sensitivity in section IV.

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This issue becomes a bit unclear when the answer to some question is on the tip of one’s tongue as it were. ‘I know the answer, I just cannot think of it at the moment.’ But I think the right way to describe this is that one does not know the answer at this moment. When pushed finally for a response one will have to say that one does not know it now. ‘Usually I know the answer; I just don’t know it at the moment.’

II Knowledge and Belief In Chapter 7, I presented the following account of what a belief is: If a subject is disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that works on the assumption that p then the subject may be said to believe that p.

The idea of a version of practical rationality working on an assumption was explained in the following way: A version of practical rationality, C1, works on the assumption that p if and only if there is a version of practical rationality, C2, that is variable with respect to the question of whether or not p, and C1 is a specialised version of C2 substituting the assumption that p in place of this variable.

What I am interested in in this chapter is not the idea of working on an assumption, but the prior idea of being variable with respect to some assumption. In other words, I am interested in the state of mind with respect to the proposition that p of someone whose way of behaving is governed by C2 rather than C1. My claim is that that state of mind is knowledge that p. If you know some fact then you believe it. This follows straightaway from the behaviourist accounts of belief and knowledge. If you know that p then you are disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that is itself sensitive to the fact that p. With respect to that bit of sensitivity in the version of practical rationality, we can construct a slightly more limited version of rationality that is fixed with respect to the fact that p. This is a specialised version of the original version of rationality. It is a version that works on the assumption that p. In being governed by the original version of rationality your way of behaving is automatically governed by the more limited version. This means that you believe that p. For example, if someone’s way of behaving is governed by a version of practical rationality that is sensitive to whether or not it is raining, and for the sake of argument it is raining, then the person’s

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way of behaving is at the same time governed by a version of practical rationality that works on the assumption that it is raining. In general if a function describes the working of some mechanism then a specialised version of that function with the actual value of one of the variables taking the place of that variable also describes the working of a mechanism in that actual situation. It is a description of a more limited mechanism, which does not have all the sensitivity of the first mechanism. Consider the following analogy. Where I am currently sitting there is a mechanism that works in the following way. If an object of mass m is a distance s from the centre of the earth, it is subject to a force towards the centre of the earth of GmM/s2 Newtons (where M is the mass of the earth and G is the gravitational constant). At the same time there is a mechanism that works in the following way. If there is an object of mass m here on the surface of the earth it is subject to a force towards the centre of the earth of about 10m Newtons. Given the value of the gravitational constant, the mass of the earth and its radius it follows from the presence of the first sort of mechanism that a mechanism of the second sort exists. But it does not follow from the presence of the second sort of mechanism that a mechanism of the first sort exists. The second mechanism might be a gravitysimulating mechanism that reflects no sensitivity to the mass of the earth or the radius of the earth. It is clear in this case that the first sort of mechanism is not a special case of the second sort of mechanism. No mention of the latter sort of mechanism is required in an account of the former. In exactly the same way, knowledge does not need to be a special case of belief just because knowledge implies belief. Knowledge is a quite separate state of mind. That knowledge implies belief follows from the fact that belief requires less adaptability than knowledge. It has sometimes been suggested that knowledge does not imply belief.2 The supposed counterexample is that of an unconfident student who is being tested on a series of historical dates. She is asked for the date of the battle of Agincourt, the dates of Henry VIII’s reign and so on. She claims that she has no idea, but when asked to guess she gets all the answers right, since she had once learnt these dates. Is the right way to interpret this example to say that she does not believe that the battle of Agincourt was in 1415, but she really knows that it was? Certainly she may be inclined to say when she realises that she got it right, ‘Oh, I must have known that all along.’ But at the same time she would not say that she really knew that the battle of Agincourt

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was in 1415. So I think her saying that she must have known the answer all along is like the earlier example of someone with the answer on the tip of his or her tongue. She did not really know the answer, but was in a state in which she could know the answer just by unpacking her memory without any further access to the facts. On my behaviourist account, she does not believe that the battle of Agincourt was in 1415, since she is not disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that works on that assumption. Her guessing behaviour seems to be rationalised by that assumption, but the very fact that her behaviour is guessing and so carries no further commitments suggests that she is not really disposed to behave in a way that makes sense given the assumption that the battle of Agincourt was in 1415. The same goes for the question of whether she knew the date of the battle of Agincourt. Certainly there is some sensitivity in her behaviour to that fact. But this sensitivity does not amount to her behaviour being governed by a version of practical rationality that is itself sensitive to that fact, since guessing behaviour cannot really be regarded as rationalised by that fact. Although knowledge implies belief on my account, it is no part of the account of what it is to know something that you believe it. Indeed, in my account the notion of a version of practical rationality being sensitive to a proposition is more basic than the notion of a version of practical rationality working on the assumption of that proposition. The latter is regarded as a specialised version of the former. This means that the account of knowledge depends on ideas that are more basic than those that the account of belief depends on; and so in a sense knowledge is more basic that belief (notwithstanding the order in which they come in this book). However, I do not think any very neat account of belief in terms of knowledge is available. The best I can do is the following unwieldy claim: To believe that p is to be governed by a version of practical rationality that is a specialised version of a version of practical rationality that someone who knows that p would be governed by, with the assumption that p replacing the variable whether or not p.

Tim Williamson (2000: Chapter 1) also argues that knowledge is a quite separate state of mind from belief. While accepting that ‘a fullblown exact conceptual analysis of believes in terms of knows is too much to expect’ (2000: 47), he claims that, roughly speaking,

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believing that p is treating the proposition that p as if one knew that p. I think this rough and vague formulation would make a reasonable gloss on my unwieldy analysis, which for all its unwieldiness I do take to be a full-blown exact conceptual analysis.

III The Objects of Knowledge Theoretical knowledge is traditionally taken to be knowledge of facts, and I have been following this assumption so far. In this section I want to suggest that it is more helpful to begin with to think of the object of knowledge not as a fact but as the answer to a question (notwithstanding the fact that answers to questions are themselves facts). This is in line with my suggestion in Chapter 6, section I that practical rationality works on answers to questions to yield answers to further questions. It is useful to recall and develop the observation made in section I contrasting the grammar of knowledge and the grammar of belief. You can know whether it is raining, how to get to the lecture, what the name of that man is, who the president of France is, why sugar dissolves in water or where Kathmandu is. In each case the specification of your state of knowledge is in terms of the answer to this or that question. By contrast, it would be absurd to say that you believe whether it is raining, how to get to the lecture, what the name of that man is, who the president of France is, why sugar dissolves in water, or where Kathmandu is. However, not all knowledge is, on the face of it, knowledge of answers. You can know a person, a town, a language, a book, or a song. You can also know a fact of course. This gives rise to three possible strategies for providing a philosophical account of knowledge. We could start from knowledge of answers and try to account for the other sorts of knowledge in terms of that. We could start from knowledge of things, perhaps taking knowledge of facts – knowledge that – as a special case and try to account for knowledge of answers in terms of that. Or we could give different accounts of the different sorts of knowledge but explain at the same time how they are related to one another; for it is not just an accident of language that we talk of knowledge of facts and also knowledge of answers. In particular, knowing whether Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal is very closely related to knowing that Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal. The second strategy is followed by Jason Stanley and Tim Williamson (2001). They appeal to a principle deriving from Karttunen

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(1977) that questions denote the sets of their true answers, which are propositions. From this they conclude that once you know a fact that happens to be the answer to some question then that is the same as knowing the answer to that question. If one fact was the answer to questions framed in two different ways, these would then be ways of framing the same question. And knowing the answer in each case would be the same piece of knowledge – namely knowing the fact. As I have explained, in the behaviourist account knowing the answer to a question needs to be treated as basic, since it is the answers to questions that figure as variables in a version of practical rationality. This is why I do not follow the Stanley/Williamson strategy. Also I have a straightforward difficulty with it. If knowledge that is the basic kind of knowledge just as belief that is the basic kind of belief, why is it alright to talk of knowing answers to questions but not alright to talk of believing answers to questions? I do not see why we need to accept that a question is individuated by its true answers. Suppose you are introducing someone and you have forgotten his or her name. This means that you have forgotten what the person’s name is, and, at least for the time being, you do not know what his or her name is. You are not in a position to answer the question, ‘What is this person’s name?’ Nevertheless you may be quite able to answer the question, ‘Is this person’s name Mary?’ You have not forgotten, and so still know, whether this person’s name is Mary. There is just one fact here – the fact that this person’s name is Mary. But you are in two different states of knowledge with respect to it. You know the answer to the question: ‘Is this person’s name Mary?’ But you do not know the answer to the question, ‘What is this person’s name?’ even though the answer to both questions is the same – namely, ‘This person’s name is Mary.’ We can imagine someone else at the party who says, ‘If you knew whether her name was Mary, why didn’t you tell me?’ Your response is, ‘You didn’t ask me whether her name was Mary; you asked me what her name was.’ Knowing something goes with being able to tell it to someone else. So imagine that person says instead, ‘If you knew that her name was Mary, why didn’t you tell me?’ Your response in this situation is that you didn’t know that, so you couldn’t tell him or her. This seems right even though you did know whether her name was Mary, and could have told the other person that, had the person asked. There is another question too that is answered by reference to the fact that this person’s name is Mary. I may know the answer to the question, ‘Which person’s name is Mary?’ without knowing the answer

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to the question, ‘What is this person’s name?’ I may even know the answer to the question, ‘Is this person’s name Mary?’ without knowing the answer to the question, ‘Which person’s name is Mary?’ In this latter case if I go through the procedure of asking, ‘Is this person’s name Mary?’ of everyone in the room I will find the answer to the question, ‘Which person’s name is Mary?’ Equally if I could list all possible names, I could turn my knowledge of the answer to the questions of the form, ‘Is X this person’s name?’ into knowledge of the answer to the question, ‘What is this person’s name?’ So there is usually something unstable about the epistemic position I am describing. But that does not mean it is not possible or even common. To summarise my claims here let me formalise a little. Let Q1 and Q2 be questions and A be the proposition which is the true answer to both of them. I claim that you may know the answer to Q1 without knowing the answer to Q2. You may also know the answer to Q1 without knowing A (even though A is the answer to Q1). Indeed, you may know the answer to Q1 without knowing that the answer to Q1 is A. Now Stanley and Williamson might have the following response to this sort of example. They might claim that you either do know that this person’s name is Mary and what this person’s name is and whether it is Mary or you do not know any of these things. If you have forgotten her name then you may be reminded of it by the question, ‘Is her name Mary?’ but you would not be reminded by the question, ‘What is her name?’ So the fact that you can answer the former question and not the latter does not mean that before the question was asked you were in two different states of knowledge. It just means that what you know after being asked either question depends on the question. I think this interpretation of the example is consistent, though it is certainly a bit odd. It would follow that you did not know the answer to the question, ‘Is her name Mary?’ but you would have known it if you had been asked it! On my interpretation, you did know the answer to that question but not to the question, ‘What is her name?’ You are in a different epistemic state to that of someone who can answer both questions and also to someone who can answer neither. But this difference is not to be explained as a difference in the facts you know. The answer to a question must be distinguished here from an answer to a question. Not any old answer will do. The answer to a question is the right answer to that question. In the sense that matters

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here, answers are things you find in the world. In this way they are like facts and unlike propositions or beliefs. The answer is out there, not just in here. So, knowing the answer to a question is being in touch with something in the world just as knowing a fact is. The answer to the question is available as an input to the version of practical rationality that your way of behaving is governed by. In your behaviour you are rationally sensitive to the answer to that question. In Chapter 6, section I, I suggested that a version of practical rationality is best thought of as mapping answers to questions about the situation on to sets of answers to other questions about what is to be achieved. Talking of practical rationality as mapping kinds of situation on to structures of recommendations concerning what is to be achieved should be taken to be convenient shorthand. These observations about the objects of knowledge support this suggestion. The issue is slightly complicated by the fact that the very same string of words might be used to ask quite different questions requiring quite different answers depending on the context. Consider different correct answers to the question, ‘Where are you?’ ‘I’m on the train.’ ‘I’m in the second carriage from the front.’ ‘I’m exactly halfway between Oxford and Banbury.’ ‘I’m here.’

It seems that answers are partly identified in terms of the needs that the answers meet. These needs are what are required in order to make progress with the questioner’s rational and practical activities. The same form of question may be used to express a variety of such needs. For example, I may need to find my way to somewhere, I may need to inform someone of where I am so that they can collect me, I may need to work out how long it will be before I am somewhere else, and so on. The absurdity of saying that I know that I am here is that it is hard (though perhaps not impossible) to conceive how the answer, ‘I’m here,’ meets any rational or practical need. So knowing the answer to a question is knowing how to make a certain kind of progress with one’s rational and practical activities. The same answer, provided in response to different requirements, may constitute different kinds of progress with rational and practical activities. And the same string of words used to ask a question in different contexts may express the need for different kinds of progress with such activities.

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How, given all this, are we to understand the straightforward claim that someone knows that this person’s name is Mary? Which practical need should we consider this as being an answer to? Or should we not try to reduce knowledge that to knowledge of answers to questions? I can see nothing much wrong with thinking of knowledge that as a species of knowing a thing rather than as a species of knowing an answer. In other words we can understand what it is to know a fact in terms of the model of what it is to know a person or a city or a song, and so on. I will consider this shortly. First, I will consider whether we can reduce the idea of knowledge of facts to that of knowledge of answers. The simplest reductive way to understand someone’s knowing that this person’s name is Mary would be to say that such knowledge amounts to knowing the answer to the question of whether this person’s name is Mary, together with the fact that this person’s name is Mary. Whether this person’s name is Mary is something you may know even if you do not know the answer to the question of what this person’s name is. The answer to the former question does not really depend on any implicit assumptions about what the questioner needs. It is the kind of question a barrister might ask in court without any context to it and demand an answer – yes or no. This approach takes knowledge that p as a conjunction of two separate claims – p itself and knowledge whether p. Such a conjunctive account certainly has an air of implausibility to it. Knowing one thing is taken really to be knowing something else altogether plus another condition, and that does not seem right at all. It also contradicts my earlier claim that you can know whether someone’s name is Mary, when her name is Mary, without knowing that her name is Mary. So, according to this reductive approach, it is possible to have forgotten what someone’s name is, since one has forgotten the answer to the question, ‘What is her name?’ and at the same time to know that her name is Mary, since one remembers whether her name is Mary. This does sound paradoxical. Even if knowing the answer to a yes or no question could be described as knowing a fact, focusing only on knowledge of facts when considering theoretical knowledge would be to ignore vast areas of epistemology. Knowing where you are, for example, or knowing how to get to King’s Cross, is not just a matter of knowing yes or no answers to courtroom-style questions. An advantage of my essentially pragmatic approach to theoretical knowledge is that it carries seamlessly over into practical knowledge.

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According to this approach, all knowledge is knowledge of how to answer questions, and, more specifically, this is knowledge of how to make progress with one’s activities. Knowing whether something is the case is one way to know how to make progress with one’s activities. But equally, so is knowing how to do things – for example how to ride a bicycle. The question, ‘How does one ride a bicycle?’ may, depending on the requirements of the questioner, be answered by riding a bicycle and saying, ‘This is how.’ Then, if you have the ability to ride a bicycle, the answer to this question is available to you to make progress with your practical activities. In this sense you know how to ride a bicycle. The same string of words in another context may constitute a question which may be answered by teaching someone else to ride a bicycle, even if you cannot do it yourself. Or it may be answered by describing how to ride a bicycle. These are all different ways in which you may rightly be described as manifesting knowledge of how to ride a bicycle.3 The same analysis works for other kinds of practical knowledge. If I claim that I know how to speak French, what this means is that I am disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that is itself sensitive to the answer to the question: ‘How does one speak French?’ Speaking French, up to a certain level of competence, counts as answering this question. And that is why knowing how to speak French and having the capacity to speak French may come to nearly the same thing. They do not come to exactly the same thing if it is logically possible to have the capacity to speak French yet not know that that is how to speak French. Related to knowing how to do things is knowing what to do in certain circumstances. If you are someone who always knows what to do, then your way of behaving is always sensitive to the answer to the question: ‘What is to be done?’ The answer may involve describing what is to be done. Or it may involve demonstrating it: ‘This is what is to be done.’ What about knowledge of people, knowledge of places, knowledge of books, and so on? This sort of knowledge does not seem to be a matter of knowing answers to particular questions. That I know Mary does not seem to amount to my knowing the answer to a question. It would be wrong to think of Mary herself as the answer to a question. If someone asks where Mary is and pointing at her I say, ‘There’s your answer,’ it is not really Mary that is the answer, but Mary being over there that is the answer.

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Knowing Mary is not always the same as knowing about Mary. Knowing about Mary does seem to be a matter of knowing the answers to questions about Mary. But it looks as if you can know Mary without knowing very much about Mary. Sometimes we talk of knowing someone when all we mean is that we can locate them in a narrative. ‘Do you know France’s ex-president Mitterand? Well, apparently he . . . ’ You may not know Mitterand personally, but for the purposes of this conversation you do know him. There are a number of different ways you can know someone. You can know them by repute. That is how most of us know ex-president Mitterand. You can know them by sight. You can know them to say hello to. You can know them to talk to. You can know them as a friend. Often when you say you know someone you imply that you are on speaking terms with them. When you say you know a book you may imply that you have read it and that you can remember it. When you say that you know a film you may imply that you have seen it, and so on. When you say that you know Paris you may imply that you have spent some time there and that you can recognise the city and perhaps find yourself around it a bit. But these precise implications depend on the context. In another context, it may be sufficient to have heard of Paris in order to know it. ‘Do you know Mary? Can you ask her a question for me?’ ‘Do you know that photograph of my mother on the mantelpiece? Would you mind fetching it for me?’ ‘Do you know Paris at all? Where’s the best place to buy second-hand designer clothes?’ ‘Do you know the Bhundu Boys’ latest album? Is it any good?’ In each case knowing something is being disposed to behave in a way that is sensitive to it. The thing itself is available to figure in one’s beliefs and intentions. What this amounts to is that one can form de re beliefs and intentions with respect to a thing that one knows.4 This is a very minimal requirement. I know Henry VIII because I am in a position to have de re beliefs about him. For example, I believe that he had his second wife executed. I know him as a historical figure. And what this means is that I am able to talk about him historically. If I knew him by sight this would mean that I would be able to recognise him visually. If I knew him to talk to this would mean that I would be able to talk to him. If I knew him personally this would mean that I would be able to interact with him personally. This sort of knowledge does not fit exactly into the account of theoretical and practical knowledge I have been presenting. According

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to that account, to know something is for that thing to be an input into the version of practical rationality that one’s way of behaving is governed by. People, cities, books and so on are not themselves inputs to a version of practical rationality. I have argued that answers to questions are the inputs to a version of practical rationality; and people cities, books and so on are not answers to questions in the appropriate way. But it only requires a relatively small extension of that account to explain knowledge of such things. You know a city, person, book and so on if you are disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that is itself sensitive to answers to questions about (de re) that city, person, book, and so on. So knowing Mary does at least involve being in a position to know things about Mary. The context determines the set of questions that are appropriate for any particular knowledge claim. This brings us round to the final way of understanding knowledge that. Might knowledge of a fact be like knowledge of a person in the sense that it just requires that you can have thoughts about that fact? More fully it would require that you are disposed to behave in a way that is governed by a version of practical rationality that is itself sensitive to questions about that fact. The sort of question that would be relevant here is what implications that fact has for your behaviour in certain circumstances. Now you cannot refer to the fact that Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal and answer questions about its implications without being able to answer the question whether Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal. And if you can answer that question and the answer is yes, then normally you are in a position to refer to the fact and answer questions about its implications. But, as the example of Mary showed, sometimes you are not. So it seems that we can explain the relationship between knowing that and knowing whether without having to regard one of them as a species of the other.

IV Sensitivity to Evidence As rational agents we respond to the way the world is, but not of course when facts about the way the world is are out of our reach. A finite being faces limitations on what it can know at any one time. Our sensitivity to the way things are is conditional on the answers being evident to us or apparent to us. And not all answers can be evident to us.

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So a behavioural mechanism that is actually working could not in practice be governed by a version of practical rationality that was sensitive to all the answers, nor even to all the answers that belonged to even just one way of describing the world. We might think of a version of practical rationality that was fully variable with respect to all such answers as governing a mechanism that was present but just not working. Such a mechanism would work if all its operating conditions were satisfied. And its operating conditions would include the fact that all the relevant answers were evident. But as we do act even in the light of only partial evidence, some behavioural mechanism other than the fully variable one clearly is working. This mechanism is working even when the relevant answers are not evident. Indeed, this mechanism is sensitive to whether such answers are evident. So what were operational conditions of the ideal fully sensitive mechanism – namely that the relevant answers are evident – become conditions that the actually working mechanism is sensitive to. Instead of being conditions that determine whether the mechanism is working or not, they are conditions that determine how it works. The point can be illustrated using the example of a very different sort of mechanism. Consider the mechanism that results in a car going at a certain speed in fourth gear. It works as follows: The speed of the car is a function f of the degree to which the pedal is depressed.

Of course this is too simple; but it would not be too hard to describe the rule more accurately. This particular mechanism does not work if the car is in third gear or not in gear at all, there is a great wind, the car is on a hill or if the engine is not switched on, and so on. These represent failures of the operating conditions of that particular mechanism. Now any of these operating conditions may be taken inside the working conditions of a more widely functioning mechanism – one that is working even when the first one is not. Such a mechanism might work as follows: The speed of the car is a function g of the gear the car is in, the degree to which the accelerator pedal is depressed, the head wind and the slope.

This particular mechanism still does not work if the engine is not switched on, there is no petrol, and so on. But we could if we wished continue the process of specifying more and more widely functioning mechanisms.5

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In the same way we can broaden our conception of a behavioural mechanism so that it works in certain ways when the relevant answers are evident and in different ways when the relevant answers are not evident. In particular in the version of practical rationality that governs such a mechanism we can include recommendations for searching to make answers evident when they are required. For example: if it is not clear how to get to the place you are going then ask somebody; if you are making milky coffee and it is not evident where the milk is then look for it or change the goal and make black coffee, and so on. So we need to include in a version of practical rationality ways of dealing with the presence or absence of evidence. There is a very clear parallel between this and the need outlined in Chapter 6, section I, to include ways of dealing with the presence or absence of means to achieve goals. Just as a version of practical rationality must make recommendations concerning the means to achieve its goals so it must make recommendations concerning how to make evident what is not yet evident. And just as it must provide for the renegotiation of goals in the absence of available means, it must provide for the renegotiation of goals in the absence of any way of making required answers evident. Alongside what David Wiggins (1987) dubbed ‘situational appreciation’ we must include the capacity for ‘informational appreciation’.6 Rather simplistically a version of practical rationality that includes sensitivity to evidence will embody rules like the following: If it is evident that the milk is in the fridge then fetch some from the fridge. If it is evident that there is no milk then go and buy some. If it is not evident whether or not there is any milk then look in the fridge to make it evident.

This can be represented in a flow diagram, like the one in Figure 9.1. Now it looks as if this structure of inferences does not have as a variable whether or not there is milk in the fridge but only whether or not it is evident that there is milk in the fridge. And this is the case even in the case where it is evident and we would want to attribute knowledge. But if someone is sensitive to whether or not it is evident that there is milk in the fridge and it is evident, then not only does the person know it is evident that there is milk in the fridge, but the person thereby knows that there is milk in the fridge. If the evidentsensitive rules outlined above govern the way someone behaves and

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Is it evident that there is milk in the fridge?

Yes

Use the milk in the fridge!

Yes

Go to the shop and buy some milk!

No

Is it evident that there is no milk in the fridge

No Look in the fridge!

Figure 9.1

What should I do to get some milk into my coffee?

it is evident that there is milk in the fridge then the following rules thereby govern the way the person behaves: If there is milk in the fridge, then fetch some from the fridge. If there is no milk then go and buy some.

And of course these rules do not govern the way someone behaves when it is not evident whether or not there is any milk. Evidencesensitive mechanisms are automatically fact-sensitive mechanisms when the evidence is present, but not when it is not.7 There is a possible technical objection that needs to be dealt with here. This is based on the thought that the fact that it is evident that there is milk in the fridge is equivalent to the conjunction of the fact that it is evident whether there is milk in the fridge and the fact that there is milk in the fridge. This suggests that we can substitute for the evidence-sensitive rules above the following equivalent rules: If it is evident whether or not there is milk in the fridge and the milk is in the fridge then fetch some from the fridge. If it is evident whether or not there is milk in the fridge and there is no milk in the fridge then go and buy some. If it is not evident whether or not there is any milk then look in the fridge to make it evident.

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What is notable about these rules is that whether or not there is milk in the fridge seems to figure as a non-redundant variable; but these rules govern the way even someone who does not yet know whether there is any milk in the fridge behaves. It seems as if even the person who does not know whether there is milk in the fridge is sensitive to whether there is any milk in the fridge. And this would invalidate my account. Fortunately this objection does not work. The key point is that you can be sensitive to whether or not (A and B) is true without being sensitive to whether or not A is true. Your situation may be that you are sensitive to whether A is true when B is true and you may be sensitive to whether or not B is true but you are not sensitive to whether or not A is true when B is false. Looking at the second set of the three rules above the variable whether or not there is milk in the fridge is not present in the third rule. And it cannot be put in there artificially either. Try substituting for the third rule this pair of rules in which we place the variable redundantly: If it is not evident whether or not there is milk in the fridge and there is milk in the fridge then look in the fridge to make it evident. If it is not evident whether or not there is milk in the fridge and there is no milk in the fridge then look in the fridge to make it evident.

These rules do not govern the behaviour of the subject, because in their version of practical rationality if there is no milk in the fridge they should go and buy some, not go and look in the fridge; and this is incompatible with the second rule. In the case where it is not evident whether or not there is milk in the fridge we would be able to specialise the above version of practical rationality to the following: If there is milk in the fridge then look in the fridge to make it evident whether or not there is. If there is no milk in the fridge then look in the fridge to make it evident whether or not there is.

And these rules do not govern the person’s behaviour in that situation. What this all means is that when the answer is not evident to someone then what figures as a variable in the version of practical rationality that governs their behaviour is not the answer itself, but whether or not the answer is evident. However, when the answer is evident, a version of practical rationality governs that person’s

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behaviour in which the answer itself figures as a variable as does the answer to the question of whether the answer is evident.

V What is it for Something to be Evident? To make this account a bit more precise, we must consider now what is meant in this context by saying that the answer to a question is or is not evident to the subject. I think that what it means to say that an answer is evident is just that in the circumstances of the subject the answer may rightly be concluded. One would be entitled to determine the answer if one were in those circumstances. So whether something is evident to a subject is an objective matter inasmuch as it does not depend on whether the subject takes it to be evident. It is also a perspectival matter, since it depends on the subject’s situation and his or her skills and abilities. For example, if a recognisable object is in a subject’s direct line of vision, the light and other circumstances are suitable, and the subject has normal eyesight (i.e. the subject has the capacity to recognise a recognisable object in his or her direct line of vision, etc.) then the subject is entitled to conclude that such an object is there. In such circumstances we may say that it is evident that such an object is there. Now this account of what we mean by evidence looks a bit complicated and perhaps also a bit circular. Would it not be much more straightforward to say that it is evident that a certain sort of object is there if the subject sees that it is there, or more generally knows that it is there? On this view, something is evident just when it is known.8 But this would fail to accommodate the idea that knowledge involves sensitivity to evidence. Indeed on this view, the fact that something is evident is a fact about the subject’s state of mind not a fact about his or her environment. That does not sound like the right way to understand the notion of evidence. And more to the point, even if that were the right way to understand evidence, it would not serve my purposes here. I am after the idea of a condition in a subject’s environment to which the subject might be sensitive; and that condition is whether someone in the person’s position may rightly conclude the answer to such and such a question. It does not really matter whether we call this condition the fact that the answer is evident. This condition is an ineliminably normative condition. It is satisfied if the subject should conclude the answer. Some people may have difficulty with the idea that such a normative notion might figure in the operating conditions of a mechanism. They think that norms should

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be kept out of our descriptions of causal processes, perhaps because norms do not have any reality independent of our social practices. However, it is a central feature of my approach that norms do get involved in causal processes.9 If the norms of evidence only exist embedded in social practices then in being sensitive to evidence people are sensitive to social practice. There need be nothing mysterious about this. Whether or not some answer is evident depends on the perspective of the agent. It depends on that person’s situation in relation to that answer. And this includes his or her perceptual, rational and other faculties. What is evident to you may not be evident to me either because I am not in the same proximity to the answer or because my faculties may not be as reliable as yours. The subject’s basic perceptual and rational capacities are the subject’s capacities to answer certain questions in certain circumstances. Such capacities cannot be determined in advance of determining the subject’s sensitivity to evidence; hence the appearance of circularity in the earlier formulation. We determine what epistemic capacities a subject has by establishing which capacities give rise to the conception of evidence that the subject is actually sensitive to. We might construct alternative possible versions of practical rationality each with a different repertoire of capacities to answer questions determining its conception of what is evident. Then the one (if there is one) which the subject’s way of behaving is sensitive to determines the subject’s epistemic capacities. What counts as evident to a subject in some circumstances is determined by what basic epistemic capacities the subject is counted as having. And whether a subject is counted as having certain basic epistemic capacities depends on whether the subject is generally sensitive to what is evident assuming those capacities. So as long as a subject is sensitive to some conception of what is evident then we can attribute the epistemic capacities that go with that conception to the subject. This is just the same as the way basic acts are attributed to a subject.10 Working from different sets of basic acts leads to different recommendations being made concerning the ways to achieve goals and different constraints on what goals can be achieved. To each different set of postulated basic acts corresponds a different version of practical rationality. If the subject is governed by one such version of practical rationality then the repertoire of basic acts that figures in that version can be attributed to the subject.

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The repertoire of a subject’s basic capacities depends causally on physiological, psychological and sociological factors. But there need be no straightforward way for determining the subject’s basic capacities from these factors. Still subjects can alter their repertoire of basic capacities by working on these factors, in particular by training themselves. Then they can do more, and more is evident to them. It does not automatically follow from the fact that you have the ability to answer a question in some set of circumstances that the answer to that question is evident in those circumstances. For example, I have the general ability to answer the question of whether a barn is in my direct line of vision. But it does not follow that when it is in my direct line of vision it is evident that it is. If I am in a film set where there are plenty of convincing papier-mâché barn façades dotted about, then my general ability to recognise barns in front of me does not make it evident that there is a barn in front of me even when there is. And this is the case whether or not I am aware that I am in a film set.11 The question of what is evident does not merely depend on the subject’s general epistemic capacities and that subject’s relation to the thing in question. It also depends on the wider circumstances. And we can establish what is evident to a subject without considering yet what the subject knows or does not know. The true role of epistemology is to establish what answers should or should not be concluded when. It should be concerned with what is evident. The question of whether a subject actually knows some answer depends further on whether the subject is sensitive to that evidence. This is an issue in the philosophy of mind. But if we conclude that an answer is not evident then this issue does not even arise. So you can fail to know some answer because that answer is not evident even when the answer to such questions would normally be evident. You can also fail to know something which is evident just by failing to be properly sensitive to what is evident. As I explained earlier, we can rule out a generalised failure to be sensitive to a certain kind of evidence, since in such a case we would not attribute the respective epistemic capacities to the subject and so the answer would not be evident after all. But it is possible to be sensitive generally to a certain kind of evidence and yet fail to be sensitive to it on a particular occasion through something going wrong with one’s epistemic mechanisms. I might say that I should have known something but failed to attend properly to what was evident. In most people’s repertoires of general perceptual abilities will be the following sorts of things: if presented with a yellow object in

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good light, subjects can answer what colour it is; if presented with a face they have seen several times before they can conclude whose it is; they can tell whether a solid shape will fit inside a gap; they can tell what someone within earshot has said; they can see how to get round a series of obstacles; they can tell when they have received a minor blow to the face; and so on and so on. These abilities depend on not having perceptual impairments and having reached a basic stage of perceptual training. Others come at a later stage. For example, I can answer the question of whether a bird that is presented to me is a starling or a finch, but my three-year-old daughter has not yet got that ability. Your repertoire of basic perceptual skills probably grows by the day. In each case having the epistemic capacity to answer some question in some set of circumstances means that the version of practical rationality to which you are sensitive will answer that question in those circumstances when that is a goal for it. When there is no requirement to answer some question – like the question of what is currently in your field of vision – then having the epistemic capacity to tell what is in your field of vision does not automatically result in your knowing what is in your field of vision. Having the acquisition of some piece of knowledge as your goal and achieving that goal through epistemic means amounts to attending to the answer to that question. Attending is not an extra condition that must be met in order to acquire the knowledge. In the parallel case of basic acts, just because you have the capacity to move your foot forwards in certain circumstances does not mean that you are moving your foot forwards in those circumstances. You will move your foot only when that is your goal. This is what it is to try to move your foot. The idea of attending to the answer to some question is parallel to the idea of trying to achieve some goal. If I need to know whether there is any milk in the fridge in order to decide whether to go to the shops, the rational thing to do is to put myself in a position in which the answer to that question is evident to me. This will involve opening the fridge door and peering inside. I have the basic ability to tell whether there is milk in the fridge in that circumstance. It follows normally that in that circumstance it is evident that there is or is not milk in the fridge. Acquiring sensitivity to whether there is milk in the fridge by making the answer evident visually is to see whether there is milk in the fridge. More generally, to perceive something is to have sensitivity to it through having sensitivity to its being perceptually evident.

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Perception is not just becoming sensitive to something by perceptual means; it is also retaining sensitivity to something by perceptual means. Having established sensitivity to the presence of something in my line of view through visual means, I may keep looking at it. I am still perceiving that it is present even though I am not learning that it is present. I am retaining sensitivity to its continued presence through the same means. You have basic abilities corresponding to all the other epistemic categories too. Consider testimony. If someone tells you the answer to some question that the person is in a position to answer then you can answer the question yourself. This way of acquiring knowledge depends not just on your psychology and physiology but also on the situation around you, in particular on the authority of the person who is providing the testimony. I may have the capacity to learn things from Jenny but not from John, and this will depend partly on me but partly on John and Jenny. Your basic ability with respect to memory is that if you could answer a question not very long ago, then you can answer it now. Sometimes this is a means to acquiring knowledge. This will be when you have forgotten the answer in the meantime, and you must recall it. Being sensitive to the answer to some question in the past enables me to become sensitive to it again. But memory is very often less a means to acquiring knowledge and more a way of holding on to it. It is a means of remaining sensitive to an answer. Exactly what ways of acquiring knowledge through memory one has available will vary from person to person and situation to situation. To someone with a good memory the name of someone he or she has just been introduced to may be evident, whereas to someone with a poor memory it may not be. An example of an inferential epistemic means is the use of modus ponens. Most of us have the basic ability to infer Q from if P then Q and P. So if it is evident to us that if P then Q and it is evident that P then it is evident to us that Q. So being sensitive to the facts that if P then Q and that P enables us to become sensitive to the fact that Q. The ability to do simple arithmetic is another example. It is evident to me how many balls are in a bag if it was evident that there were two balls in the bag and that another two balls have been put in the bag without any being removed. Becoming sensitive to this answer through sensitivity to this evidence is what working out the answer amounts to. Just as we may know things and facts as well as answers more generally, so we may acquire and retain knowledge of things by the very

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same means with which we acquire and retain knowledge of answers. And, for facts that have subject–predicate structure, we cannot acquire knowledge of the fact without having knowledge of the thing that the fact is about. As I argued at the end of section III, knowledge of some thing is to be understood as that thing being available to one’s version of practical rationality. And this amounts to having the capacity to have de re thoughts about it. So, acquiring knowledge of a thing is putting oneself in a position where one may have de re thoughts about that thing. Seeing someone is putting oneself in a position to have thoughts about the person by means of sensitivity to that person’s being visually evident. Remembering someone is putting oneself or keeping oneself in a position to have thoughts about the person by the means of retaining sensitivity to that person’s being evident in virtue of having been evident before.

Notes 1. This talk of facts is exchanged for talk of answers to questions in section III. 2. See Radford (1966), Armstrong (1973: 138–49). 3. Paul Snowdon (2003) argues that knowing how can be understood in terms of knowing that this is how, thus undermining the supposed distinctiveness of practical knowledge; and this is in line with the Stanley/Williamson argument. While I take this to be a very important insight, it does not by itself lead to the conclusion that knowing that is basic. 4. See the discussion of the distinction between de re and de dicto beliefs in Chapter 7, section V. 5. It is an interesting question whether we might finally end up with the specification of a mechanism that always worked (i.e. that had no operating conditions). This would be the universal mechanism, and the laws that described how it worked would be the fundamental laws of nature. While many people assume that this is where the science of physics is taking us, there are dissenting voices. See Nancy Cartwright (1983). 6. Jonathan Dancy (2000: 56–8) argues for something similar when he claims that reasons must go through an ‘epistemic filter’ before they count as reasons for us. Although the metaphor of a filter is misleading, what Dancy is after here is just the idea that something only counts as a reason for action if the agent should have known it. When my notion of evidence is spelt out in section V, I am committed to the similar idea that something only counts as a reason for action if the agent was entitled to conclude it.

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7. Whether being sensitive to an answer requires in every case that one is sensitive to whether that answer is evident is something I am not quite sure about. 8. Tim Williamson identifies the evidence with what is known (2000: Chapter 9). But he acknowledges that his view is not radically different from the position I am advocating that a subject’s evidence should be identified with what the subject is in a position to know. And he does not provide much in the way of argument for favouring his view over that alternative. 9. This was the central thesis of Stout (1996). 10. See Chapter 6, section I. 11. See Goldman (1976).

10

Consciousness

I Types of Consciousness One of the apparent difficulties with behaviourism is that it treats the mind in a dispositional way, while not everything in the mind is dispositional. In particular, mental occurrences are not states at all and so cannot be dispositions to behave. For example, having a thought, noticing something, having a pang of regret, calculating a sum in one’s head, silently reciting a poem can none of them be dispositions to behave. Descartes’ conception of the mind starts with occurrent processes of thought like the process of thinking that one is thinking or the process of doubting whether one is thinking. It is with such thoughts and processes of thought that the strongest temptation arises to use spatial metaphors about the mind. These thoughts ‘pass through’ one’s mind. They occur ‘within’ one’s mind. And so on. Such metaphors cannot be taken literally, since there is no space in which these thoughts do actually move around. But, according to what Ryle (1949: Chapter 1) ridicules as the Cartesian myth of the ghost in the machine, they move around in something other than space – a mental realm. This is a sort of quasi-space – a world within. These non-spatial motions are described disparagingly by Ryle (1949: 19) as ‘para-mechanical’. His approach, as we have seen, is to recast our talk of the mind in a dispositional idiom, thus avoiding the temptation to use spatial metaphors. But the very phenomenon that gives rise to this temptation most strongly – namely occurrent thought – is something that Ryle himself never felt he dealt with adequately in The Concept of Mind.1 And it is not just mental occurrences that cannot be dispositions to behave. It seems that when one is conscious of anything, even one’s state of consciousness is categorically present. It is as if consciousness unlike a state of belief, intention or knowledge is a real-time phenomenon.

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There are two ways to understand the idea of states of consciousness. One is as states of being conscious and the other is as states that are themselves conscious. So on the one hand we talk of people being conscious at all and also of being conscious of various things in their environment. And on the other we talk about their beliefs or emotions as being conscious or unconscious states, of their experiencing something as being a conscious state of awareness, and of a process of thought being a conscious process.2 It is a feature of the approach that I advocate to treat the idea of a person being conscious of something as the more basic notion. This is by contrast with much of the philosophical work on consciousness, which treats the idea of a mental state or process being conscious as primary. According to this mainstream approach, the problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining the special quality that some mental states and processes have that makes it right to say that there is something it is like to be in those mental states or undergo those processes. For example, Alvin Goldman (1993) states that the core sense of ‘conscious’ is that in which a mental state is conscious. For Goldman the notion of a person being conscious of something can be analysed in terms of that core notion as follows: To be conscious of an object, x, is to be in some (partial) state of phenomenal awareness which includes a representation of x. (1993: 364)

I presume that the state of consciously thinking counts as a state of phenomenal awareness. It would follow that when I am consciously thinking about Henry VIII I am conscious of Henry VIII. (If thinking about Henry VIII does not seem to have enough qualitative content to count as a state of phenomenal awareness then consider instead having a peculiarly vivid fantasy about Henry VIII.) But there is an important contrast between consciously thinking or fantasising about something and having a conscious experience of something. In both cases one is in a conscious state of mind (and conscious of being in that state of mind), but in the latter and not the former case one is actually conscious of the object of that state of mind. In order to be conscious of Henry VIII, one would have to have Henry VIII himself and not merely a representation of Henry VIII present to one’s conscious mind. So I do not take the idea of a state or process being conscious to be prior to the idea of a subject being conscious. The idea of a subject being conscious comes in at least three forms. We may think of consciousness as a relation between a subject and an object. This is the

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idea of a person being conscious of something. Consciousness may also be thought of as a property of a subject alone. So we talk of someone simply being conscious or unconscious. And finally we do sometimes talk of a person being conscious that something. The idea of someone simply being conscious or unconscious is probably best understood in terms of someone being conscious of some things or being conscious of nothing. So this second form of consciousness may be explained in terms of the first one. I think the third one may be too. When I am conscious that it is very cold I am conscious of its being very cold. I am conscious of a state. When I am conscious that the train is moving I am conscious of the process of the train’s moving. So nothing is lost if we concentrate on the first form of a person being conscious – namely that of a person being conscious of something. Concerning the other type of consciousness, that of a person’s mental states and processes being conscious, we can distinguish two approaches. One is to take the consciousness of a state or process of mind to be an intrinsic property of that state or process. This property might be thought of as the qualitative or phenomenal nature of the mental state or process. The other way is to think of conscious mental states or processes as mental states or processes that the subject is conscious of. Then consciousness is not an intrinsic property of mental states and processes, but a feature of how those states and processes relate to the subject. So in this way we may explain this type of consciousness too in terms of consciousness of something.3 This distinction between consciousness understood as an intrinsic feature of mental states and processes and consciousness understood as what things a subject is conscious of may look a bit like the distinction Ned Block (1995) makes between phenomenal consciousness and access-consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is supposed to be that intrinsic feature of mental states and processes that means that there is something it is like to be in such states or undergo such processes. It is the experiential quality of a mental state or process. Access-consciousness is an epistemic idea. Roughly, a state or process is access-conscious if the subject has access to it. Block provides a slightly more precise characterisation of accessconsciousness in terms of being poised for free use in reasoning and rational control of speech and action. But for present purposes the looser formulation is more appropriate since it fits more of the wide variety of characterisations presented by philosophers who have wanted to make use of the distinction.

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I don’t want to make any use of the distinction. For one thing, the distinction completely ignores what I take to be the central idea of being conscious of things in one’s environment, since accessconsciousness is limited to consciousness of one’s states of mind. For another, access-consciousness is usually defined in such a way that it does not capture even the limited category of states of mind being conscious. As Block himself observes, it is possible to imagine a blindsight sufferer who has access to some information for the purposes of rational control and yet who is not conscious of having this information.4 In section II I will provide an account of being conscious of things that does not need to be supplemented by the notion of any other type of consciousness. It aims to capture what the notion of phenomenal consciousness is supposed to capture while holding on to the idea of consciousness as a relation between a subject and the things present in the subject’s environment (including his or her mental states and processes). The principle that a mental state is conscious just in case the subject of that state is conscious of it is endorsed by David Rosenthal (1986). He qualifies the claim by requiring that the subject’s consciousness of his or her mental states relies neither on inference nor on observation. But this qualification is only necessary because his conception of what it is to be conscious of something is so loose. For Rosenthal, being conscious of one’s mental states just requires having a thought about them. If I infer that I am in a certain mental state then I am having a thought about what state I am in, but I am not conscious of my mental state. The problem then is with Rosenthal’s conception of what it is to be conscious of something, not with his general conception of what it is for a mental state to be conscious. The account of what it is to be conscious of something that I will provide should combine with Rosenthal’s claim that a mental state is conscious just if the subject is conscious of it to give a worked-out account of what it is for a mental state to be conscious. There is, however, a worrying objection to Rosenthal’s general conception of what it is for a mental state to be conscious. It is that in general it is just not true that being conscious of something makes that thing conscious. So why should it be true that being conscious of one’s mental state makes that mental state conscious. Goldman puts the point succinctly: A rock does not become conscious when someone has a belief about it. Why should a first-order psychological state become conscious simply by having a belief about it? (1993: 366)

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This point is aimed specifically at Rosenthal’s worked-out theory in which it is sufficient to be conscious of a mental state that one has a belief about that mental state. But the objection works just as well against the general claim that to be a conscious state it is sufficient that the subject be conscious of the state: a rock does not become conscious when someone is conscious of it. A feeble response to this objection would be to say that although in general it is not the case that something becomes conscious when a subject is conscious of it, yet it is true in the case of mental states. This response is feeble because it leaves unanswered the question of why the principle applies in some cases but not in others. Why should a mental state become conscious just because its subject is conscious of it? A better way to respond to this objection is to observe that there is an adverbial form of consciousness in addition to the adjectival. Subjects may consciously be in certain mental states; they may consciously do or undergo mental processes. What it means to say that subjects’ mental states are conscious is that they are consciously in those states. And what this means is that they are in those states with consciousness – they are conscious of being in them. Likewise an action is conscious if the agent is acting consciously. So although there is no reason why being conscious of something should make that thing conscious, being conscious of doing or undergoing something or of being in some state does mean that one is doing or undergoing that thing or is in that state consciously and that in turn allows one to say that the doing or undergoing of it or the state is conscious. This can be illustrated with the following series of transitions: I am feeling anxious and conscious of it. I am consciously feeling anxious. My feeling of anxiety is conscious.

The doubtful stage in this series of transitions is the last one – the transition from the adverbial form of consciousness to the adjectival form of consciousness. In general it is not a good transition. For example, it sounds wrong to go from saying that I am quietly standing in a queue to saying that my standing in a queue is quiet. However, we might in just the same way think that it also sounds a bit odd to talk of my feeling of anxiety being conscious. It is not the feeling that is conscious but me that is conscious, just as it is not my standing that is quiet but me that is quiet. And this suggests that talking of states of mind as conscious may simply be a kind of metonymy like

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saying that it is a sad day for me when what is really sad is not the day, but me. To test this hypothesis we might consider the example of being conscious of a state which is not a mental state – for example of the state of being soaking wet. I am soaking wet and conscious of it. I am consciously in the state of being soaking wet. My being soaking wet is a conscious state.

The first transition seems fine and the second one seems odd, though perhaps acceptable as a kind of metonymy. But whatever we think of the soundness of the transition from the adverbial form of consciousness to the adjectival form, I want to insist that there is nothing in the claim that an experience of something is conscious that is not captured in the claim that the subject is consciously experiencing that thing.5 There is a way of talking about conscious and unconscious beliefs and desires that is a little bit different. To say that a belief or desire is conscious is not normally to say that the subject is conscious of it. My belief that Henry VIII had six wives or my desire to write a book were conscious beliefs and desires last night when I was fast asleep and not conscious of having them. At any rate they were not unconscious beliefs and desires in the sense that my belief that my sexuality was shameful or my desire to kill my parents might have been. Does this threaten the approach that aims to understand conscious states in terms of consciousness of those states? In fact the issue is not just one for my approach but also for the approach that prioritises the idea of states being conscious over the idea of subjects being conscious of things. Just because my belief that Henry VIII had six wives is a conscious belief it does not mean that that belief has got the quality of phenomenal or experiential consciousness. So I think for both opposing approaches the strategy here should be to say that this talk of conscious/unconscious beliefs and desires works with a different, albeit derivative, sense of the word ‘conscious’. Perhaps what is meant by saying that a belief is conscious in this sense is that it can easily be made into a conscious belief in our target sense. According to my approach, this would mean that the subject can easily be conscious of believing it. I can easily become conscious of believing that Henry VIII had six wives but not so easily become conscious of believing that my sexuality is shameful.

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II Consciousness and Knowledge There is a dispositional sense in which being aware of something is just knowing that thing. To say that I am aware that Henry VIII had six wives is just to say that I know that he did. And there is a rather strained sense in which we might also say that I am conscious that Henry VIII had six wives. Equally, we may say that I am conscious or not conscious of whether I brushed my teeth this morning. But this strained sense of being conscious is clearly not what we are after in this discussion of consciousness. Although I have known that Henry VIII had six wives for many years now, and in some sense been aware of the fact, I have not been conscious of it for all this time. The fact has not been present to my consciousness. So to be conscious of something in the less strained sense is for that thing to be present to one in some way. I know Henry VIII by repute, not in virtue of his being present to me. I know that I brushed my teeth this morning because I can remember doing it or because I can work out that I must have done it. In neither case is the fact that I brushed my teeth present to me. The constraint that the objects of consciousness must be present to the subject does not apply to objects of knowledge more generally. So consciousness is not knowledge. But it is closely related to knowledge, since we come to know things through conscious experience. It is not solely through conscious experience that we know things, since inference, memory and testimony provide knowledge of things without consciousness having a central role – at any rate not consciousness of the things that are known through these means. But consciousness is a means to knowledge or a basis of knowledge, a means in which the object of consciousness is present to the subject in some way. The traditional way to do epistemology is to provide conditions under which a belief counts as knowledge in terms of its relationship with conscious experience. But this approach may be turned upside down. Given the behaviourist account of knowledge recommended in the previous chapter, we may grasp the idea of perceptual knowledge independently of a grasp of the idea of perceptual experience. So we can use our grasp on the idea of perceptual knowledge and an account of what it is for something present to be a basis for it to provide an account of perceptual experience. There are two elements in this account of consciousness. One is that to be conscious of something that thing must be present to you.

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The other is that to be conscious of something you must be in a state which is a means to knowledge. Putting these two elements together yields the following account: S is conscious of O if and only if O’s present relationship with S provides S with a means to knowledge of O.

The condition that the object of consciousness must be in a present relationship with the subject imposes a significant constraint on what sorts of things can be objects of consciousness. In particular, things that are attributed properties timelessly rather than at a time cannot have present-tense properties and so cannot be present to a subject. The number 2 has its properties timelessly. You cannot be conscious of the number 2 because the number 2 cannot be presently in a relationship with you, and so cannot be present to your consciousness. This just follows from the relationship the number 2 has with time. Any property we attribute to it we attribute timelessly. It is not presently in relationship with anything. So although people may claim to have mystical experiences of being conscious of the number 2, of pure goodness, of the ineffability of things, of God, or of any other thing that has its properties timelessly, I am not sure that such claims make any sense. Things which may be present to consciousness are things that are attributed properties at a time. They may have a property at one time and not have it at another time. So they belong to the special category of things that persist through changes in their relationships with the world. Physical objects, states and processes are things that have properties at a time, whereas abstract objects, facts and events have properties timelessly. I can say of a chair that it is now broken and it was not broken before, or of the process of giving a lecture that people are attending to it but soon will not be. Objects and processes change; the properties they have are different at different times. But I cannot say of an event like the lecture I gave last week or of a fact like the fact that my chair is broken that these things now have properties that they do not have at other times. Numbers, events and facts do not belong to the category of things that change.6 This is why you can be conscious of states of things – the pinkness of the sky – but not of facts about things – the fact that the sky is pink. In the same way you cannot be conscious of things that have happened or will have happened – for example the event of the lecture – even at the time, whereas you can be conscious of things that are happening – for example the process of presenting a lecture.

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There is a familiar problem that arises at this point. That is the problem of how one can be conscious of distant processes that have long since stopped happening – like the exploding of a distant star watched through a telescope or the sound of a cricket ball being hit when it was hit half a second before the subject was conscious of the sound. However this problem is to be treated, it does not seem to be a particular difficulty with the behaviourist account I am presenting. It sounds natural to say that these things are indeed in a present relationship with the conscious subject, and hence that the subject can be conscious of them. And yet these things no longer exist. I will simply duck the challenge of how to make complete sense of this. While consciousness is a relationship with present things, it is not simply knowledge of present things. I can know Julie now, and in knowing her, know something that is present and has properties right now, but not be conscious of her right now. She may be on the other side of town, and I may be thinking about something else altogether. For me to be conscious of Julie, it must be her present relationship with me which is the means by which I know her or anything about her now. For example, if her being right now in my direct line of vision is the means by which I know her then I am conscious of her. On this view, the crucial point about being conscious of something in experience is that one becomes or remains sensitive to it by some epistemic means. For example, I might become and remain sensitive to the crying of a baby in the next room by means of the sound of that baby crying being within my auditory range. This, on the behaviourist account that I am offering, is to be conscious of the crying of the baby in the next room. My way of behaving becomes sensitive to the presence of the pen I have been looking for underneath the computer keyboard by means of that pen being in my direct line of vision, after I have lifted up the keyboard. This is to be conscious of the presence of the pen. We may be conscious of things without learning anything. Having spotted my pen under my computer keyboard I continue to stare at it for some seconds. My way of behaving is already sensitive to the presence of the pen, yet the conscious experience of seeing it there continues. The mental occurrence is not over when the learning is over. By means of the pen remaining within my line of vision I remain sensitive to its presence. I am sensitive to this by other means too. Even if I stopped looking at the pen, I would still know it. I would be able to form judgements about the pen on the basis of inference from the

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persisting nature of pens and the lack of any pen-removing features in the environment. But this does not stop me from knowing it by visual means at the same time. If the inference were not available to me I would still know the pen by the visual means that I am employing; and this is all that is required to be able to say that I am seeing the pen. In addition to seeing the pen, I might be looking at the pen or I might be watching the pen. Each of these uses a slightly different perceptual means to establish or retain a different kind of sensitivity. In looking at the pen I may be becoming and remaining sensitive to the general state of the pen. In watching the pen I am becoming and remaining sensitive to any processes happening with the pen. And there may be plenty of other things about the pen that I can become and remain sensitive to through visual means. For every different way of knowing something by means of its present relationship with one, there is a different mode of consciousness. I know a sound by means of being in some present auditory relationship with the sound, where the sound is loud enough and close enough and there are not too many distracting sounds. I know the pain in my foot by means of that pain being acute enough. These are very different ways of knowing something through its present relationship with one, and are likewise very different kinds of conscious awareness. Inference is one of our basic epistemic means. So why is there no inferential mode of conscious awareness? Why can one not be consciously aware of something by inference? The answer, I think, is that inferential knowledge of something does not work by means of that thing being in some present relationship with one. Suppose I see someone (someone I know to be honest) walking out of a shop with a toy that I know costs five pounds. I can infer the presence in the shop till of five pounds from that transaction, and can have beliefs about it and form actions with respect to it. But it is not the present relationship of that five pounds to me that is my means of knowing it. For this reason we say that my knowledge of it is not based on conscious experience. The case is more obvious for memory. Memory is a means to knowing something, but, as a means, it does not depend on the presence of the thing in question. So remembering someone is not a way of being conscious of that person. Another test case for this kind of approach to conscious experience is that of testimony. Testimony is an epistemic means just as perception is. So why shouldn’t it provide one with conscious experience too?

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Very often testimony does not provide one with sensitivity to what is present. I can learn about Henry VIII by repute, but I cannot consciously experience him by repute. But testimony can also provide one with knowledge of what is going on at the moment, by means of the presence of whatever is going on. Consider a radio commentary of a football game. I think this may provide one with a conscious experience of the game. It does not merely provide one with a conscious experience of the sound of a game or of the sound of a couple of men talking about the game. In being told about what is going on you consciously experience what is going on. You are listening to the football match, not just making inferences about the football match. Your knowledge of the game and your ability to have de re beliefs about it is gained by means of the changing ongoing game’s present relationship with you – its being commentated on in your hearing. If the game were being described after the event by sports commentators on the radio, then it would not be the game as a present ongoing process that was in some relationship with you and thereby giving you knowledge of it. That is why it is not possible consciously to experience a game of football by having the game described to you after the event or by watching a replay of it. What is being described after the event is not at the same time present to you. Also if the commentary is live but very limited then the listener cannot experience the game itself rather than experiencing the commentator and inferring facts about the game. Suppose for example that you just hear over the radio someone saying, ‘I can report that the game has just begun,’ and that is all the person gives you. In this case you are only conscious of the person saying that and not of the game itself. That is because your means of knowing the game in this case is inference from what the commentator says – a means that does not depend on any present relationship with the game itself. It is sometimes argued that being conscious of something requires having the capacity to identify that thing demonstratively – to refer to it by saying ‘That!’ or ‘This!’ or to grasp it or point to it, to attend to it and bring it to the attention of others. For example, Bill Brewer writes as follows: What is characteristic of the subjective perspective of conscious perceptual experience, on my account, is its provision of essentially perspective-dependent demonstrative content, grasp of which requires actual perceptual attention to their objects in the environment. (Brewer 2002: 201)

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My account seems to demand less of consciousness, but the difference is really only apparent. On my account, to be conscious of something requires gaining or retaining knowledge of it by means of its present relationship with one. This means that one is in a position to have de re thoughts about it – thoughts about that thing. This does not yet amount to having demonstrative thoughts about it, in the sense that is usually required. I can have de re thoughts abuot Henry VIII, but I cannot identify him demonstratively. But if one’s capacity to have de re thoughts about the object of consciousness is based on its present relationship with one, then this gets pretty close to being a capacity to have demonstrative thoughts about it. That being said, I am not sure how useful such talk is when considering our consciousness of the pinkness of the sky, the sweetness of the tea, feeling hot, and so on. We can know these things by means of their presence to us without that knowledge consisting in the ability to locate them in any sense. Brewer also requires that grasp of the content of conscious perceptual experience requires perceptual attention to its objects. In Chapter 9, section V, I argued that what it means to say that you are attending to something is just that one of your goals is knowing that thing, and you are achieving that goal through some basic epistemic capacity. Attending to something is the same as directing your epistemic capacities on to it. So, it is generally true that being conscious of something involves attending to it. In general you cannot know something through some epistemic capacity without it having been a goal for you to form that knowledge. Of course perceptual knowledge can be forced on you; someone may be shouting in your ear, telling you something you do not want to know. But we might say in such cases that the goal of forming that knowledge is also being forced on you. You do not have full conscious control over your epistemic goals. So you may have no way of stopping yourself attending to what is being shouted in your ear. Blindsight is often thought to constitute the best sort of counterexample to an epistemic conception of consciousness of the sort I am advocating. Sufferers from blindsight are able to guess correctly the shape of an object placed in some part of their visual field while claiming no awareness of the existence of that object. The information is getting through to their brain, but not in the sort of way that would give them conscious experience. Once they find out about the reliability of their guesses they will be able to become sensitive to the

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shape of an object placed in the dark part of their visual field by means of guesswork. But unlike normally sighted people, blindsight sufferers do not know the object simply by means of the object being in their line of vision. They are learning about the object through inference from guesswork. For, in order to be seeing something consciously, the presence of that thing to one’s visual system must be the means by which one knows it. Blindsight sufferers learn about the presence of some shape on their blind side by means of forming a guess and knowing that their previous guesses were successful. This is very different from knowing it simply by having it in their line of vision. Blindsight sufferers are in the same position as radio listeners who are learning about the football game by making inferences from what people are saying. They are not in touch with the thing they are gaining knowledge of. Suppose blindsight sufferers got so good at their way of determining the shapes of objects that they no longer inferred the shapes from their guesses but became sensitive to the shapes just by looking in the right direction, having been told that there is a shape of some sort there. Including the requirement that they have to be told that there is a shape there is a bit awkward, and for the sake of the example we may assume what is in fact not the case that they can become sensitive to the presence of an object in the dark part of their visual field when they look in the right direction without being told anything. Let us also suppose what is not in fact the case either that they can tell how many objects there are, where they are and in what orientation they are. Blindsight sufferers can reach out and pick up an object in the dark part of their visual field; they can remember the layout of objects in their visual field; in fact they can do everything sighted people can do. By using the same perceptual means they become sensitive to the same things. Now, is it still plausible to suppose such people are not visually conscious of their blind side?7

III Self-knowledge It has seemed to many philosophers that one of the most damning objections to behaviourism is that it cannot provide a plausible account of self-knowledge and self-consciousness. According to behaviourism, what it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way. The way to tell how someone is disposed to behave is by

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observing the person’s behaviour and interpreting it. But we do not generally need to observe our own behaviour in order to tell what our own beliefs, desires and so on are. So behaviourism must be wrong. I am going to challenge the assumption that the only way to tell how someone is disposed to behave is by observing and interpreting the person’s behaviour. I think that if the person whose behavioural disposition is to be established is oneself, then one has more direct means to the knowledge. One may know how one is disposed to behave in simple cases just by being so disposed, and in more complicated cases by using one’s imagination. In his chapter on self-knowledge Gilbert Ryle claimed that our ‘knowledge of other people and of ourselves depends on noticing how they and we behave’ (1949: 181). He defended this claim by considering our knowledge of whether we are lazy, ambitious, witty, conceited or patriotic. These examples are well suited to Ryle’s approach. He also considered our knowledge of whether we understand something, and rightly observed that this may depend on what we discover later about our own behaviour with respect to it. But with respect to other aspects of a state of mind this approach works less well. Knowledge of what you are doing, thinking, feeling and so on is not acquired by observation of your own behaviour. Ryle acknowledged this and identified knowing what you are doing with being alive to what you are doing. But there is something more here that Ryle ignored. I know that I am now writing a section of my book on behaviourism on self-knowledge. Certainly I am alive to what I am doing. But there is also a specific piece of knowledge I have. It is reasonable to ask the behaviourist how I can have such knowledge. And the answer will have nothing to do with observation of my behaviour. After all, I knew that I was writing this section of my book before a single word was typed into the word processor. Here is a thought experiment. Ask yourself what you would say if someone asked you whether Henry VIII had six wives. Reflect for a second or two on the process you went through in answering that question. Now ask yourself whether you believe that Henry VIII had six wives. Reflect for a second or two on what you had to do to answer that question. Was there any difference between the two processes? The first was the process of establishing how you are disposed to behave. The second was the process of establishing your state of mind. It is usually assumed that we have privileged access to our own minds. We are generally in a better position to know what we ourselves think than anyone else is. Sometimes we can deceive ourselves

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and actually be in a worse position to know what is in our own mind than someone else, but it is reasonable to assume that usually we have some sort of privileged access to our own minds. It is also usually taken to be obvious that we do not have privileged access to how we behave. But this is what I think the behaviourist should deny. It may indeed be the case that other people are as entitled to judge which scientifically specifiable bodily movements have occurred in us as we ourselves are. But there is no reason to think that others are as entitled to judge how we are disposed to behave as we are. I think that very often we have direct access to how we are disposed to behave, whereas usually other people have to work it out. So behaviourists may accept that we have privileged access to our own minds so long as they also accept that we have privileged access to our own behavioural dispositions. Of course there are exceptions to the principle that we know how we are disposed to behave directly. Consider the complex of behavioural dispositions that constitutes the activity of biting my fingernails. I may have these dispositions without knowing it. In such a case, it may well be through observation of my behaviour that I acquire the knowledge of what I am in the process of doing. Also I may be wrong about my dispositions to behave. I may think that I am in the process of defending myself against a false accusation when in fact I am in the process of evading the threat of having to face some frightening truths about myself. But generally I know what I am in the process of doing not through observation of my behaviour. What is the point of knowing how you are disposed to behave? It is not always necessary in order to do something that you know that is what you are disposed to be doing. I may successfully and unconsciously bite my fingernails. I may be disposed to behave in a way that is guided by a goal without at the same time being disposed to behave in a way that is sensitive to the fact that I am disposed to behave in a way that is guided by that goal. However, the latter sensitivity is important for two reasons that I can see. The first, though perhaps less important, reason for knowing how you are disposed to behave is that you can tell someone about it. Much of our activity is joint activity, and language is often the best way to co-ordinate such joint activity. Telling someone what you are in the process of doing depends on you yourself knowing what you are in the process of doing. The second reason for knowing how you are disposed to behave is so that you can co-ordinate your own activities. In order to write this

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book I must know where I am with respect to the overall project. I must know that I have written the chapter on knowledge, because that was a precondition of writing the chapter on consciousness. I must know that I am now writing the section on self-consciousness so that I put aside for the time being the behaviour that will be required in order to write the section on qualia. Fingernail-biting is a piece of behaviour that does not need to be co-ordinated with larger plans. That is why it is possible to do it without knowing it and not screw up the co-ordination with the rest of one’s goals. But most of what one does must find a place in what else one does, and for this to happen self-knowledge is required. This makes it clear that knowledge of what one is in the process of doing is not an optional extra. One would not be able to act in a way that was governed by even the simplest version of practical rationality unless one had such knowledge. I guess neither babies nor nonhuman animals have such ability, and neither babies nor non-human animals can put together co-ordinated structures of planned activity.8 I still have not answered how one acquires such knowledge. I think the answer (however feeble it sounds) is that one acquires knowledge of what one is disposed to do just in virtue of being disposed to do it. To become sensitive to what one is disposed to do by being disposed to do it is a basic epistemic ability one has. It no more requires a philosophical explanation than does the ability to raise one’s finger, the ability to locate a recognisable object in one’s line of vision, the ability to tell that something is moving in one’s peripheral field of vision, the ability to make a simple inference, and so on. Psychology has the task of explaining how we have these basic abilities, not philosophy. It is an ability that probably develops along with the ability to tell others what you are in the process of doing and the ability to co-ordinate your different activities. Of course this ability is not infallible as the cases of nail-biting and self-deception show. A similar story may be told for other types of self-knowledge. I know that I am looking at a computer screen. Not only do I have an experience of a computer screen, but I am also aware of having that experience. So I am sensitive to the fact that I am acquiring or maintaining sensitivity to the computer screen. This second-order sensitivity is an essential element of anything sophisticated enough to incorporate the acquisition of knowledge into its structure of goals. In order to determine what I need to find out, I need to know what I know and I need to be aware of it when I find out about it. As with acquiring knowledge of what one is in the process of doing, it seems

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that acquiring knowledge of what one is becoming aware of is a basic epistemic ability. In becoming sensitive to how one is disposed to behave just by means of the presence of that disposition one is consciously aware of how one is disposed to behave. This is the behaviourist position on conscious awareness that I outlined in the previous section, and it seems to work here. It treats self-knowledge exactly on the model of a perceptual capacity. While thinking of introspection as a kind of inner perception may lead to all sorts of disastrous mistakes about the nature of the mind, I think this may be an innocent way of doing it. Not all self-knowledge is so basic, however. There are indefinitely many aspects to the version of practical rationality that one’s way of behaving is governed by. Not all of them give rise automatically to a second-order sensitivity. As we have seen, self-observation (and perhaps also therapy) is sometimes required. More interestingly, imagination is often required too. Would you like to be the leader of your country if the opportunity arose? Faced with that question, you may have to think for a few seconds before realising what the answer is. You acquire the knowledge by some imaginative act of thinking. If some aspect of the way you are disposed to behave is not immediately known then you may acquire knowledge of it by playing out an imaginative scenario in which you would have to act one way or the other depending on which way your disposition went and, still within the game of make-believe, determine how you would be acting. This ability to do a dummy run without actually moving one’s body around is of crucial importance in various aspects of deliberation. It may seem to be an ability that should cause the behaviourist some difficulty, since imagination goes on ‘in the head’ without any behaviour being manifested. But, while I do not have to hand a worked-out behaviourist theory of imagination, there is no reason why imagination should be regarded as a major obstacle to the behaviourist programme. Imagination may not involve actual bits of behaviour being manifested, but it does change the way one behaves in characteristic ways. Gilbert Ryle’s chapter on ‘Imagination’ in The Concept of Mind makes a case for the claim that in imagination one may seem to experience something, but that this should not be confused with actually experiencing a seeming-something. True, a person picturing his nursery is, in a certain way, like that person seeing his nursery, but the similarity does not consist in his really looking at a real likeness of his nursery, but in his really seeming to see his nursery

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itself, when he is not really seeing it. He is not being a spectator of a resemblance of his nursery, but he is resembling a spectator of his nursery. (1949: 248)

The right model for this resemblance, according to Ryle, is that of play-acting. Imagining doing something is pretending to do it. It is an exercise of the ability to do it which does not involve any actual physical behaviour. When a tune is running through one’s head, one is doing what one would be doing in following the tune if the tune were actually being heard. Or perhaps one is doing what one would be doing in producing the tune except not making any sounds. Ryle writes: Fancying one is listening to a known tune . . . is to listen for those notes [which would be due to be heard] in a hypothetical manner. Similarly, fancying one is humming a known tune . . . is to make ready for those notes in a hypothetical manner . . . Silent soliloquy is a flow of pregnant nonsayings. (1949: 269)

To get one’s intuitions clearer here it is worth doing some introspection. Imagine saying the sentence, ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.’ Now open your mouth, and keeping your mouth hanging open, imagine saying it. If you are like me, the second of these exercises will have felt slightly unsatisfactory. This is because in the first exercise you were probably going quite a long way towards saying the sentence, and in particular sounding the letter ‘p’, without actually saying it. The imaginative exercise may have taken about the same amount of time that the actual saying would have taken, and some of the difficulty of the actual act of saying the sentence may have been experienced in the imaginative exercise. But you might equally go through the sentence rather faster, not with any particular accent and not rehearse any difficulties with the tongue-twisting nature of the sentence. In fact you might be doing something more like pretending to read the sentence or listen to the sentence than pretending to say the sentence. But even if what you are doing is pretending to say the sentence there is a huge range in the level of detail that such a process needs to involve. Imagination may be thought of on the model of ‘tracing’ parts of a computer program. In tracing a computer program you work through some steps without actually running the program. In a complex program there may be indefinitely many possible functions of that program that are not explored in a normal series of runs. One may explore them by setting up some values of the variables and stepping

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through the program from various points to see what will result. Imagination may be thought of as the faculty of stepping through bits of one’s way of behaving without actually behaving. What actually changes in a process of imaginative thought? One thing that happens is that you acquire knowledge of your way of behaving. By imagining some scenario you learn how you would act should that scenario materialise. This is to characterise imagination in terms of what it is a means to achieving. But imagination has a more intrinsic nature, a nature that leads people to think that it must involve the actual manipulation of mental items as opposed to a merely makebelieve manipulation. One thing that one can do in the process of imagining is to commentate on what would be going on. You are staring dreamily into space imagining doing something or other. At some point I ask you what is happening now (or, perhaps, what would be happening now if this were real) and you can answer. If I had asked you the same question a few moments later you would have given a different answer – the next thing would have been happening. This real-time ability to report on the imagined scenario is a real aspect of the way you are behaving. In imagining doing something there is something behavioural going on after all. Similarly you might be asked to drop the pretence and just do what you are imagining doing. You would usually be able to do something at any rate similar to what you were imagining at just that moment. If you were imagining saying something you would be able to say it out loud. One move that a behaviourist can make about conscious linguistic thought processes is that as a word passes through your mind, you are disposed to utter that word in those circumstances where it is appropriate to speak your thoughts aloud. Then every event within such a process is a change in how you are disposed to behave. This change is an occurrence. Suppose you say to yourself the phrase ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper’. Just as the word ‘pickled’ passes through your mind, you are disposed to say ‘pickled’ if asked to speak your thoughts. These manifestations of imagining are not completely reliable. If I am imagining flying and someone asks me to drop the pretence and make it real, I don’t have very much I can really do except perhaps forlornly spread my arms out. And the ability to commentate on the imagined scenario is by no means reliable either. I may be imagining something that I cannot really describe. But even if I cannot describe

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it I can recognise it. If I were shown the right thing, I would be able to say yes that is just what I am imagining. So imagining may be thought of as a process of exploring bits of one’s way of behaving without actually doing very much. But this process of exploration involves a real structure of changes in how one is disposed to behave. It is not that nothing happens; but what happens would only be revealed in special circumstances. Not only are imaginative games of make-believe a feature of very early childhood play, but imagination is also a crucial feature of the ability to plan and co-ordinate structures of activity. It is also essential for changing the way one behaves in the light of potential conflicts and for determining what one will need to find out in order to follow one’s planned course of action.

IV Qualia The conception of consciousness that I have been developing is essentially an epistemic conception of consciousness. What Block and other authors label ‘phenomenal consciousness’ seems to be completely ignored by this sort of approach. Phenomenal consciousness is supposed to be that aspect of human experience that there is something it is like to have. Qualia are supposed to be those aspects of conscious experience that figure in phenomenal consciousness. I am very suspicious of this idea that there is something it is like to be conscious (phenomenally) which has nothing to do with what you are sensitive to and how. Generally philosophers who talk about phenomenal consciousness argue that no account like the one I have presented can capture what it is like to have an experience. They claim that it would be quite possible for something to satisfy the account I have presented without having phenomenal consciousness – without there being anything it is like to be that thing. Such things are zombies. They function perfectly well in the world. They know how to behave; they know about their environment; they have goals and beliefs; but they do not have phenomenal consciousness. There is something it is like to be married to a millionaire. There is something it is like to have a bad cold. There is something it is like to know that you will never be thirty again. There is something it is like to speak French fluently. All these states are states one is conscious of, but they do not seem to be what people who talk about qualia are after. Is there something it is like to add 33 and 79 together and realise that the answer is 112? Is there something it is like to look at a triangle?

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It is not obvious that there is anything essentially mysterious about what it is like to be a certain subject having a certain experience. And there is no need to think that the phrase ‘what it is like’ picks out intrinsic or inner properties of an experience. It is natural to think that there being something it is like to be S is the same as there being a perspective or a point of view associated with being S – it is the same as there being a world that is knowable from that perspective. There is nothing it is like to be a stone, because there is no world that is knowable from a stone’s perspective. We do not have to look inside the stone (and find nothing) to tell this. The favoured example of people who take qualia seriously is experience of secondary qualities. For example, there is something it is like to see red or smell a rose or feel hungry. These experienced properties are essentially perspectival. Describing something as red is describing it from our perspective (where we are taken to be a community of people with colour vision). Only from that perspective can the idea of seeing red be understood. What it is like to see red could not be understood by someone who did not share that perspective.9 But this does not take us beyond the epistemic notion of consciousness that I have developed. There is no need to introduce an extra mysterious feature of the universe to make sense of the idea of seeing the world from particular perspectives. Frank Jackson (1982) has argued that you could know everything physical about someone and still not know what it was like for that person to experience the world. Mary, a colour scientist, has always lived in a black and white environment (we can assume for the sake of argument that her eyes were fitted with a black and white filter at birth). She knows all the physics of colour and the neurophysiology of colour response, but when she goes out into the world (or removes her black and white filter) and sees red for the first time she learns something new – what it is like to see red. Jackson concludes that what it is like to see red is not a fact that is captured by physics or neurophysiology. So there are some facts – in particular facts about colour experience – that are not physical facts. Here is the argument laid out: 1. Before escaping her black and white environment, Mary knows every physical fact about colour. 2. After escaping her black and white environment, Mary learns something new about colour – what it is like to see red.

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3. That that is what it is like to see red is a fact (and was a fact before Mary escaped her black and white environment). 4. Therefore there are some facts – for example, that that is what it is like to see red – that are not physical. There are several ways to respond to this argument. You might simply deny that it is possible to know all physical facts about colour. However much you know, there is always more you could know. But this is not a very powerful response. All that is required for Jackson’s argument is the claim that however much of the science of colour Mary knows she will still learn something when she sees red for the first time. But perhaps the point should be that there are some physical facts about colour that Mary cannot know until she has experienced colour. She cannot know what the wavelength of red light is because she does not know what red is. She knows what the wavelength of light that people call ‘red’ is; but it might be argued that that is not the same thing as knowing what the wavelength of red light is. I think there may be something in this response, but Jackson’s argument can try to sidestep it by spelling out what the word ‘physical’ is supposed to mean in this context. Physical facts can be defined as those facts that are available to a person independently of his or her perceptual perspective.10 Physical facts are those facts that can be learnt by book work alone. On this conception of physical facts there is no barrier to Mary knowing any physical fact about colour. The cost of working with this very restrictive conception of physical facts, however, is that it may turn out that there are not many or even any physical facts about colour. The conclusion of Jackson’s argument might turn out to be rather unsurprising in this case. This is indeed what I shall argue shortly. Daniel Dennett has argued that if Mary knew enough about the science of colour she would thereby know what it was like to see red. We cannot imagine someone having such a lot of knowledge, and that is why we find it hard to imagine that she would know what it was like to see red.11 But I think this response is unconvincing. There is a practical ability that Mary (before she had ever seen colour) would seem not to have had whatever science she had learnt – that is the ability to tell just by looking at something whether or not it was red.12 Her scientific training would never have given her the experience of seeing red, and she would not have any means to make anything of the experience the first

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time she was presented with something red. It does not make sense to say that she could know what it was like to see red if she did not have this ability. This suggests a stronger response.13 One might accept that Mary does learn something when she first sees red, but that she does not acquire factual knowledge. In gaining the ability to tell that something is red just by looking at it, she acquires practical knowledge. In the same way, she might have acquired knowledge of how to ride a bike by developing that skill in practice, which no amount of theoretical scientific knowledge would have given her. Now it is certainly true that Mary does acquire practical knowledge when she leaves her black and white environment. But this does not mean that she does not learn a fact at the same time. The fact is that that is what it is like to see red. It is true that that is what it is like to see red. That was what it was like to see red the day before Mary ever saw red. It is a funny sort of fact, but a fact for all that. So I am not inclined to reject Jackson’s argument against the claim that every fact is a physical fact. What I reject is that this sort of argument can be extended to refute behaviourism. Extending Jackson’s argument to an argument against behaviourism depends on the assumption that how someone is disposed to behave is a physical fact about that person – in the sense that someone who knew all the relevant physics would know it. And I have been arguing that the way someone is disposed to behave is not something that physics or physiology is able to describe. Really knowing how someone is disposed to behave requires being able to understand his or her perspective on the world. If I have only ever seen the world in black and white I do not yet know what it is like for someone to experience the colour red. That is because, not knowing what it is for something to look red, I do not know how the world is from that person’s perspective. But not knowing how the world is from his or her perspective means that I do not really know how that person is disposed to behave. For I do not know what it is to behave in a way that discriminates red-looking things from other things. This response shifts what we might think of as qualitative nature from being an aspect of inner experience to being an aspect of the world – an aspect that is only perceivable from a certain perspective. It is the world that has phenomenal qualities, not the mind. If there is any difficulty in knowing the qualitative nature of things it is not a difficulty concerning knowledge of mental things but a difficulty

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concerning knowledge of the world. So having consciousness of the way the world is includes having what Block describes as ‘phenomenal’ consciousness, since it includes awareness of the qualitative nature of things. To reiterate, the sort of behaviourism that I am defending does not seek to reduce qualitative facts – facts about the way things look and feel – to non-qualitative facts. Facts about behavioural dispositions may be qualitative in this sense. One intuition that encourages the idea of qualia is the thought that conscious experience is much too rich to be captured by any behaviourist account. So much is going on in even the simplest experience that it seems implausible to suppose that all of it can be reflected in aspects of how one is disposed to behave. I see a leaf on the ground as I walk past. It is a certain very specific shape and I experience it as that shape. It has a very fine pattern of colour which I also experience it as having. There is also something just so about the way it is balanced on the pavement as if it is just about to flip over. As I glance at it I get a strange sense of longing – a sort of nostalgia for the summer when the leaf was green and alive and at the same time I seem to connect with all the other melancholy autumn experiences of years past. There is an almost indefinite amount of detail in my experience, much of it seemingly ineffable, and it all just takes a split second. How could all that experience be identified with the knowledge of the leaf I gain by looking at it? I can feel the pressure to say that my experience is much richer than anything a behaviourist could account for. We tend to be proud of our ability to have very rich experience. It is a bit like the dualist saying, ‘Well, I at any rate have a soul.’ Owning up that you do not have a soul appears to be a terrible admission of inadequacy. But the sheer quantity of content in an experience should not make one think that there is something other than an epistemic type of consciousness. The fact that much in my experience is quite inexpressible should not be a worry either. I might know a particular shade of red very well. I can recognise it; I can associate it with other experiences; I might even be able to construct it out of a paint palette. But I cannot describe it. My knowledge in this case is not expressible except by using rather unhelpful demonstrative expressions, as in, ‘I know that it is this shade of red.’ There is no reason to presume that there is anything in the richness or ineffability of conscious experience that is not exactly matched in the richness and ineffability of what one knows by having the experience.

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V State of Play The job is not finished. This treatment of consciousness has been very swift and not taken into account a fraction of the useful philosophical work that has been done on the subject. Really, my goal has been to show the power of the behaviourist approach that works with an epistemic account of consciousness. There are many interesting issues that I have not discussed – for instance pain and other sensations. But I see no reason why they could not be dealt with satisfactorily by my account. Perhaps the most serious omission in this book is a treatment of emotion. I think emotion should fit very well into a dispositional account. Emotional states are associated with particular aspects of versions of practical rationality. There are different ways to behave corresponding to being angry with someone, being in love with someone, being frightened of someone, and so on. There are also more primitive emotional expressions which are less happily incorporated into the idea of rationality – for example, blushing, shaking, crying, and so on. To work out how all this fits together is the task of another book – one that I have not yet begun. In the current book I hope to have shown how to start constructing a satisfactory philosophical account of our concepts of belief, intention, knowledge and consciousness in terms of dispositions to behave.

Notes 1. In a series of lectures towards the end of his career Ryle made a concerted attempt to examine what it is that Rodin’s Le Penseur is doing (1971: Chapter 37 and 1979), but he stopped short of providing any sort of behaviourist account. 2. This distinction is very familiar in the extensive literature on consciousness. See for example Rosenthal (1986). 3. Another way to reduce the idea of conscious states and processes to that of consciousness of things would be to say that a state was conscious if it was a state or process involving being conscious of something. But this suggestion is quite clearly inadequate. Thinking about someone or remembering someone may be conscious mental processes but they do not involve being conscious of anyone or anything. 4. I will consider blindsight in more detail in section II. 5. This is a version of the sort of adverbial approach to conscious experience recommended by Michael Tye (1984), according to which having a red experience should be understood as redly experiencing.

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6. This claim that different sorts of things have different kinds of temporal instantiation relations, while quite obvious on the face of it, is also quite controversial. I defend it, and in particular the distinction between events and processes, in Stout (2003). 7. Daniel Dennett for one thinks not. Dennett (1991: Chapter 11) presents a highly plausible sustained defence of an epistemic approach to conscious experience. 8. David Velleman (2000) argues for the stronger claim that being inclined to know what you are doing is constitutive of your rational agency. Whereas I am merely arguing that it is a necessary component of successful co-ordinated action, he argues that being so inclined defines us as rational agents. 9. I am assuming quite a lot about the nature of colour here, and these claims could certainly be denied. 10. Philosophers often use the terminology of ‘third-personal’ facts versus ‘first-personal’ facts to express this distinction. 11. Dennett (1991: 398ff). 12. Dennett denies this, but such a denial is hard to swallow. 13. See Churchland (1985).

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Index

action, 45–6, 79–84, 90–2, 148, 154, 164 Anscombe, G. E. M., 45, 62 anti-realism about mental states, 5, 29–33, 66–7, 120, 128–9, 147, 152–3 Aristotle, 45, 79–80, 87 Armstrong, D., 41, 64, 71, 129 attention, 114, 182–3, 197–8 Bain, A., 83 Baker, L. R., 136 behaviourism characterisation, 3–4, 30, 54–6, 61–4, 75, 84–5, 89, 96, 103, 110–13, 121, 136 criterial, 33–5 psychological, 21–5, 37–8 reductive, 12–14, 24–6, 108–9 see also Ryle belief, 27, 49–51, 83, 109–12, 114–16, 121–44, 154–7, 161–8 degree of, 123–4, 126–7 de re, 142–3, 174–5, 185, 198 necessary and contradictory, 125–6, 137–42 betting, 123–4, 126–8 blindsight, 190, 198–9 Block, N., 8, 189–90, 206, 210 Braithwaite, R., 26, 121, 125–8, 138 Brandom, R., 26, 31, 158–9 Brewer, B., 197–8 Carnap, R., 25–7, 30, 38 causation arguments from, 63–5 framework versus input, 64, 70, 72–6, 78, 81–2, 86, 96–7, 149–52 see also dispositions Chalmers, D., 8–9 Chomsky, N., 37

cognitive psychology, 25, 37–8, 42, 44–5, 74 Collins, A., 129–31 commitment, 130–3, 146, 157–60 consciousness, 187–211 access, 189–90 adverbial, 191–2 phenomenal, 8–9, 19, 188–90, 192, 206, 209–10 see also qualia Dancy, J., 107, 129 Davidson, D., 27, 45, 47, 153–4 decision theory, 88–9, 104, 123–6 Dennett. D., 27, 47, 208 Descartes, R., 54–5, 75, 80, 147–8, 187 Dewey, J., 26–7, 123 dispositions, 61–76; see also mechanisms double effect doctrine, 145–7 dualism, 5–6, 66, 147–8, 210 eliminativism, 5, 12, 30, 44–5 emotion, 7–8, 46, 211 evidence, 175–85 explanation of behaviour, 45, 63 anti-causalism, 62–3, 147 inferential approach, 69–70 normativity of, 45–51, 78–85, 87–97 teleological, 25, 79–90, 96–7, 103–4 see also causation; folk psychology; holism; intentional strategy folk psychology, 42–5, 111 functionalism, 26–7, 37–57, 61, 103, 111, 113, 136 Gibbard, A., 91 Goldman, A., 188, 190 guessing, 166–7, 198–200

220

Hacker, P., 31–2 Hampshire, S., 6 Harman, G., 109–12, 146 Hempel, C., 25–6, 30 hidden variables, 38–9, 50 holism of explanation, 38–41 of the mental, 109–13, 122 Hume, D., 22–3, 63, 70, 95 Hursthouse, R., 46 imagination, 3, 53–4, 200, 203–6 individuation of content, 137–43 inference ticket, 65–9 intention, 49, 63, 79–83, 116–17, 143–60 prior, 149–54 intentional strategy, 44–8 interpretation, 52–5, 112–17 interpretationism, 27, 55 introspectionist psychology, 21–3, 37, 54–5 irrationality, 138–42, 156–9 Jackson, F., 207–9 James, W., 26 judgement, 133–6, 154–5 Kant, I., 79, 90–2, 94–6, 108 Kavka, G., 159n Kenny, A., 99 knowledge, 161–85 of answers to questions, 102, 163, 168–75 practical, 172–4, 209 of things, 168–9, 172–5, 184–5 Kripke, S., 141 laws, 63–73, 78–86, 93–4; see also inference tickets Lewis, D., 27, 39, 41–2, 113 Locke, J., 148 Lycan, W., 135 McDowell, J., 33–4, 95–6 materialism, 5–6 Mead, G. H., 26–7 mechanism, 37, 69–86, 92, 101, 108, 128, 147–51, 166, 176–80 Melden, A., 62–3, 69, 147 memory, 10, 19, 167, 184, 193, 196–7 Moore, G. E., 34, 129–31, 159

Index Moya, C., 157 Mumford, S., 68n Nagel, T., 95–6 Neurath, O., 26 normativity, 4, 27–8, 31–2, 45–57, 87–99, 123–5, 180; see also rationality occurrent thoughts, 133–4, 150, 187, 203–6 pain, 9–11, 30–4, 40–1, 54, 64, 196, 211 Peirce, C., 26–7, 122 perception, 180–5 perspectives, 52–4, 105–6, 180–1, 197, 207–9 Place, U. T., 71 positivism, 25–6, 30, 38, 89, 96 potentiality see dispositions pragmatism, 26–32, 41, 122–4, 128, 136 presence, 184, 187, 190, 193–9 pretending, 7–8, 121, 204–5 Putnam, H., 9, 11, 14, 27, 41–2 qualia, 188–9, 192, 206–11 Quine, W. van O., 38–9, 43, 47 Rachlin, H., 25 Ramsey, F., 26, 88, 122–7 Ramsey sentence, 39–40, 49–51, 55 rationality dynamic, 44, 48, 101–8, 114, 121, 139–40, 155, 158 psychological conception, 106–9, 125 sensitivity to, 90–1, 97 specialisation of, 111, 114–17, 122, 165–7, 179 structure of, 99–106, 138–40 in a theory of behaviour, 4, 13, 46–9, 78, 140 see also explanation of behaviour representations, 37–8, 42, 79, 81, 84–5, 91–2, 94, 97, 188 Rorty, R., 26 Rosenthal, D., 190–1 Ryle, G., 75, 110, 116, 147–8, 151–2, 187, 200, 203–4 as a behaviourist, 3, 5–6, 13, 26 and dispositions, 15, 62, 65–9 see also anti-realism about mental states

Index Schlick, M., 25–6, 30 second-order rules, 93–5, 108 self-knowledge, 199–206 Sellars, W., 26, 123, 138 sensitivity to rules, 29, 92–4 simulation theory, 52–5 Skinner, B. F., 21, 23–5 Staddon, J., 25 Stanley, J., 168–70 Steward, H., 74n Stich, S., 43–4 Stimulus-Response, 22–5, 64, 97 Strawson, G., 11 super-spartans, 9–11, 32 Taylor, C., 83–5, 87 testimony, 67, 184, 93, 196–7

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theory theory, 52–3, 113 Titchener, E., 21 toxin puzzle, 159–60 Türing Machine, 42 volitions, 147–9 Von Wright, G., 62 Watson, J. B., 22–5, 38 Wiggins, D., 177 Williamson, T., 161, 167–70 Wittgenstein, L., 26–7, 29–30, 33–4, 62, 128, 147 Woodfield, A., 81, 85 Wright, L., 84–5, 87–8 Wundt, W., 21 zombies, 6–9, 206