Philosophical Issues, 22, Action Theory, 2012

EXERCISING CONTROL IN PRACTICAL REASONING: PROBLEMS FOR NATURALISM ABOUT AGENCY

John Bishop The University of Auckland

How much of a problem does mental action pose for a Causal Theory of Action (CTA)? In particular, what are the prospects for a CTA if it holds that behaviour counts as intentional action only if it results from the agents practical reasoning, and mental actions are essentially involved in practical reasoning? These are the questions I seek to answer (in Part II). But, first, I aim to explain (in Part I) why defending a CTA is important. This will provide the context in which answers to questions about the problem of mental action may emerge. Part I: Why a Causal Theory of Action Is Important, and What It Does and Does Not Need to Claim What makes CTA important concerns connections philosophy of action has with ethics. One connection rests on the fact that nothing counts as action, in the sense relevant to action theory, unless it is governed by certain norms. It is controversial whether these norms ascend from the rational to the fully ethicalas assumed by the (Kantian) project of deriving normative ethics from the consistent exercise of practical rationality. Nevertheless, there clearly is an essentially normative aspect to the notion of action that is of interest to action theory. The Normative Component in Action: The Anscombe-Davidson Thesis The sense of action relevant to action theory is that in which an action is an exercise of the agents control as agent. The exercise of agent-control is

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a success notion, and so implicitly normative. There can be agent-control only when there is some end or ends at which the agent aims, and a particular completed action exists only when such an end is achieved. Hence actions, exercises of agent-control, are necessarily intentional actions, in the sense that the behaviour in which they consist must have a true description under which (as Davidson puts it) that behaviour is intentional.1 The normativity of action amounts, then, to the requirement that actions be reasonablerelative to the ends at which the agent aims given what she takes to be true about her situation. Hence the Anscombe-Davidson thesis: actions are behaviour to which a certain kind of explanation applies intentional explanation, which explains in terms of the agents reasons for acting.

Agency as Necessary for Moral Responsibility The key connection between ethical evaluations of behaviour and intentional agency is this: agents are properly held ethically responsible for outcomes only when those outcomes occur through the exercise of their own control. Behaviour may be ethically evaluated (as outwardly conforming to duty, for example) without commitment to its status as the behavers action: but its counting as action is necessary for responsibility to be rightly attributed to the behaver. Attributions of responsibility must be well founded if agents are to be properly praised or blamed for their behaviour and its outcomeor, indeed, considered as excusable for it.2 (That an outcome came about through the exercise of the agents control is, of course, only a necessary condition for responsibility: other conditions must also be met. An agent has to be the kind of being that can be a subject of responsibility: many animals are agents without being moral subjects. Moral subjects also have to meet conditions concerning the degree of freedom with which they act if they are to be properly held responsible.)

The Problem of Natural Agency That we think of ourselves as agents who exercise our own control is fundamental, then, to our self-understanding. There is a tension, however, between this ethical self-understanding and the way we think of ourselves from a natural scientific perspective if we also hold that we belong wholly to the one universe open to natural scientific understanding. The problem of dealing with this tension is the problem of natural agency. It arises because there is room for doubting whether anything that belongs wholly within the natural order according to scientific modes of understanding could be the kind of agent we think of ourselves as being.

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Agent-Causation as Conceptually Essential For there to be an exercise of an agents control something has to come about (or continue to obtain) through that agents controlsomething must be the case because it is made to be the case by the agent. For action, then, there needs to be this kind of relation to the agent: this relation is essentialleave it out, and the agent is out of the picture. Apparently, then, the ontology of action must acknowledge irreducible bringing about relations whose subject is the agent, and the natural term for such a relation is agent-causation. I use this term na vely, just to refer to the relation to the agent involved in our idea of agency as the exercise of the agents control.3 Treating this relation as a kind of causal relation seems justified by the way we describe itas the agent bringing something about, or as making something happen or not happen. Some caution is needed, however: calling it agentcausation might suggest that this relation is a causing separate from the action itself . But that is emphatically not the case: agents do not agent-cause their actions: rather, their actions consist in a relation of agent-causation. The subject of the relation of agent-causation is the agent; its object is an event (or state of affairs) of a kind intrinsic to the type of action concerned.4

Natural Ontology as Excluding the Conceptual Ontology of Action The concept of action, then, seems essentially to involve agent-causation. When it comes to ontology, however, agent-causation has no placenot, anyway, in a contemporary natural ontology. The scientific image of the world is of a vast array of events and states of affairs related according to laws of nature, whether deterministic or statistical. There is no irreducible substance-causation.5 But the irreducible relation to the agent involved in our concept of action is a kind of substance-causation, where the substance is an agent. Our concept of action is the concept of the exercise of a causal power of the agent. Thoroughgoing Aristotelians face no problem of natural agency, since the ontology needed for agency harmonizes with an Aristotelian ontology that treats substances with causal powers as a basic natural category. The trouble is that, while an Aristotelian ontology seems required to accommodate agents with powers of control, natural ontology has, for us, become quite un-Aristotelian.6 This shift is due to two developments: first, being subject to natural scientific explanation has come to be the hallmark of the natural; second, scientific explanation has abandoned, at least at the fundamental level, explanations in terms of substances exercising their causal powers. Fundamental natural scientific explanations are covering-law explanations. Natural ontology is thus determined by the idea of every natural occurrence having an

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in principle completed covering-law explanation. This allows the construction of the notion of event-causation as the extensional relation holding between token events c and e, if and only if there is a law L under which c and e are subsumed, in the sense that there are event-types, C and E, such that c is a C-type event and e an E-type and there is a law, L, to the effect thatif L is a strict lawwhenever a C-type event occurs so also does an E-type. This, admittedly somewhat attenuated and technical type of causation, is the only type admissible as fundamental in natural ontology.7

Reconciliatory Naturalism The problem of natural agency, then, is the problem of determining whether the agent-causal relations that belong to the conceptual ontology of agency can be understood as wholly realized in entities and relations admissible in physical explanations. Unless they can be so understood, the way we think of ourselves as agents will be a way of thinking of ourselves as outside the natural order. Now, of course, there are more things in the natural world than the atoms of our current Physics (including animals and agents and persons). But affirming that evident fact is not enough to answer the present question: do all the things that there concretely are possess together the kind of unity to form a natural order that brings them in principle within the scope of our most general natural science? I use the term reconciliatory naturalism to refer to the claim that agency, and the agent-causation that is conceptually necessary for it, does fit within such a natural order.8 What motivates attachment to reconciliatory naturalism is not the (misguided) thought that all that is true, or all that is importantly true, about anything concretely real must be capturable in truths expressed in the language of Physics. Rather, the motivation for reconciliatory naturalism is the desire to be justified in regarding whatever is concretely real as belonging to a single, unified, natural order. It is the desire, to put it negatively, not to find oneself forced to regard some features of reality as non-natural or supernatural.

An Argument from Animal Agency One straightforward way to argue for reconciliatory naturalism is to maintain that many animals act for reasons, and therefore that the exercise of agent-control must belong wholly within the natural world, since no one could take seriously the suggestion that animals from aardvarks to zebras operate as non-natural agents. I think this is a sound argument. But it is dialectically defective, since a proponent of a non-naturalist view of human agency may reject the continuity thesis on which this argument relies,

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holding that there is a radical break between human and animal agency, characterized by human actions involving irreducible agent-causation not found in animal agency. On this view, non-human animals are not genuine intentional agents, even though we humans habitually describe some of their behaviour, as Dennett would put it, from the intentional stance.9 Since, therefore, it is controversial how far the status of intentional agent extends, the argument for reconciliatory naturalism from animal agency is question-begging.

The Causal Theory of Action as Defending Reconciliatory Naturalism The best way to give a non-question begging defense of reconciliatory naturalism is, I believe, to defend a Causal Theory of Action (CTA). A successful CTA will refute the claimwhich I refer to as agent-causationism that an ontology that accommodates agency must include irreducible agentcausal relations. CTA holds that action is behaviour explained by an intentional explanation, and intentional explanation is a form of causal explanation. But it is not a form of covering-law explanation. As Davidson observes, we explain by citing a cause (the window broke because it was struck by a rock), only when we do not, and perhaps could not, know the complete covering-law explanation of the explanandums occurrence.10 Just this kind of explanatory reference to causes is essential to intentional explanation. When we explain behaviour in terms of the agents relevant mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions), the explanatory force rests on the way the agents being in those states makes what he or she does intelligible as something reasonable to do in the circumstances. But there is no explanation unless those mental states also cause the behaviour they make reasonable. CTA therefore maintains that agents exercising of agent-control is wholly realized in causal relations between their having the reasons that they do for acting a certain way and behaviour which (thereby) amounts to their acting in that certain way. (Behaviour here is understood broadly to include outcomes beyond, though suitably causally or logically connected with, the agents body.) If CTA is correct, then it must be possible to provide a CTAanalysis that serves as a schema connecting the conceptual ontology of action (which rests on the agent-causal relation) with a realized ontology consistent with a naturalism that rejects agent-causal relations. A CTA-analysis will analyze action as realized in behaviour with the right kind of mental causes that make such behaviour reasonable from the agents perspective. Such an analysis will not define what it means for the action to obtainbut it will show that it is reasonable to take action to be realized in or constituted by events and states of affairs in principle explicable by subsumption under physical laws.

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It is important to note that a CTA-analysis must provide event-causal conditions that are sufficient as well as necessary for behaviour to count as the intentional action concerned. Otherwise, if merely necessary conditions are provided, it will remain open that an adequate analysis of what constitutes an exercise of agency must include an irreducible relation of agent-causation. But if an event-causal CTA-analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions for action can be given, then it will follow that the conceptual ontology of agency will not determine its realized ontology, andassuming that the kinds of mental states implicated in the analysis can themselves be understood as wholly realized in the natural ordera natural ontology of action will result and reconciliatory naturalism be secured. Limitations of Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism about Agency Though CTA is an orthodoxy in the philosophy of action, a number of philosophers dissent from it, even though they generally accept that there is some essential causal component to the notion of action. CTA does face significant challenges, and I shall elaborate on some of these shortly. So it is worth considering whether a straightforwardly Aristotelian account of agency as a causal power of the agent may not already be quite naturalist enough.11 Agent-causation may indeed be conceptually irreducible on such an account: but perhaps that is not, after all, any threat to naturalism? The threat arises, as I have explained, from the assumption that natural ontology is determined by what must be presupposed for scientific explanation at its most fundamental level. But is that assumption secure? Perhaps one should not be over-impressed by the kind of explanation we get in Physics? Other sciencesin particular, Biologyoften explain teleologically and in terms of substances exercising causal powers. Arguably, the exclusion of agent-causation from the world as Physics sees it shows only that unsurprisinglythere is more to reality than a completed Physics could describe. Concluding that irreducible agent-causation cannot belong to the natural order may thus just be a symptom of a narrow scientistic prejudice. That response deals too complacently, however, with the question whether human agency belongs wholly within the natural order or else somehow transcends it. That question presupposes some principled criterion for belonging to the natural order, and such a criterion must stem from whatever it is that unites its denizens together into the natural order. Something needs to serve as a principle of natural cosmic unity. And that is the role served by the principle that the natural is whatever is in principle explicable by fundamental natural sciencethat is, whatever is open to physical explanation, since Physics is the most general science of the natural, abstracting far enough to include all that is, yet not so far as to cease to be a science of the concretely real.12 Accepting this principle is by no means equivalent, however, to supposing that only what Physics recognizes really

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exists, nor that things can genuinely be related only in physical relations. All that is entailed is that nothing belongs to the concrete natural order unless it is ultimately wholly constituted by or realized in entities and relations recognized in Physics. If there are concretely real items for which this is not true, then (relative to our current Physics) they will not belong to the concrete natural order, and may thus be described as non-natural or supernatural.13 Neo-Aristotelian naturalism about agency will thus fall into complacency if it does no more than affirm that irreducible agent-causation is consistent with a naturalist metaphysics. If neo-Aristotelians are not simply nostalgic for a fundamental science that admits substance-causation, they must be assuming some other principle of natural cosmic unity (apart from openness to physical explanation) if they are to avoid the problem for whose solution, it seems, a CTA needs to be defended. I suspect that the only alternative for a principle of natural cosmic unity is a theological one. If God as creator is ultimate cause of the universe, then the natural order has its unity as the realm of creaturely existence. Creaturely existence could then itself exhibit distinct ontic categories: in particular, an agent could be a creature yet not wholly realized in the physical.14 Perhaps, then, a stance that regards agent-causation as ontologically fundamental but wholly natural implicitly deploys the theological notion of the natural order as the created order. The Problem of Natural Agency is a Serious Problem I conclude, then, that there really is a serious problem of natural agency. The question whether agency can belong to the natural order as determined by openness to physical explanation either has an affirmative, reconciliatory naturalist, answer or it has a negative answer. If it has a negative answer, then either some non-naturalist view of agency follows or else, if naturalism is to be retained, some different criterion (such as a theological one) for inclusion in the natural order must be in operation. Defending a CTA is a way of defending reconciliatory naturalismprovided physicalism holds true for intentional mental states, events and processes. The project of defending CTA, as indeed of defending physicalism, may thus be motivated by the desire to defend reconciliatory naturalism. But what are the prospects for successfully defending CTA against the rival agent-causationist view, according to which the conceptual ontology of agency must also be its realized ontology? Part II: Obstacles to a Causal Theory of Action: The problem of Mental Action What are the chief difficulties for a CTA-analysis of intentional action? One is the difficulty of excluding cases where the agents having reasons for

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a-ing causes a-ing behaviour in the wrong kind of way. I have recently argued that Davidson was too complacent about his own conclusion that there was no way of adequately dealing with this problem of deviance. This resulted, I think, from his adopting an event-ontology of action which effectively begs the question in favor of reconciliatory naturalism.15 But, in any case, I think it is clear that the defender of CTA (who has its reconciliatory naturalist use in mind) must provide a CTA-analysis that excludes the deviant cases: so there is sound motivation for continuing inquiry into efforts to solve the problem of causal deviance.16 Here I am concerned with a different difficulty. The idea that action consists in behaviour with the right kind of causes will not show that actions can be wholly realized without ontologically irreducible agent-causation if the right kind of causes seem to include actions themselves. So, for example, a volitionist version of CTA will not do, since a volitionist CTA-analysis retains action (acts of will) in its analysans. Davidsons CTA-analysis in Actions, Reasons and Causes appears to avoid this problem, since his analysans deals in mental states onlynamely, beliefs and pro-attitudes. Davidson himself raised the objection that, strictly, states cannot count as causes: to play a causal role mental states need events suitably associated with them. But he thought it unproblematic to allow that there were such events, such as, for example, the onslaught of a belief or desire. And he argued that, in any case, an intentional explanation could apply even though we do not know the event or events that caused the explanandum-behaviour.17 But there is a problem here. Beliefs and desires are dispositions, and dispositions play a causal role only when triggered. When we consider what the salient triggering events are when beliefs and desires play a causal role in intentional action, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they are mental events which count as the agents own actions. (The onslaught of a belief or a desire, in particular, is not of the salient kind.) Beliefs and desires are not automatic dispositions (such as solubility or fragility): they are states which dispose the agent, under relevant circumstances, to perform certain kinds of mental actionsthough these need not be deliberate, or even conscious, actions.

Exercising Control in Relation to Beliefs Consider beliefs first. Beliefs are not, as such, under the believers own controlnot her direct control, anyway. One cannot simply believe at will. However, the employment of what she believes in her reasoning is under her direct control. And an agent can be morally responsible for taking her belief that p to be true when she comes to act, even though her holding the belief that p is not a matter of her direct responsibility (though it may still come within the broad scope of her responsibility, as epistemic virtue theorists point out, if her holding that belief results from her own active inquiry,

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or failure to engage in such inquiry, or from habits and dispositions over whose development she has, over time, had control). It is important, then, to recognize the difference between an agents being in the state of believing that p, and an agents performing the action of taking p to be true in (theoretical or practical) reasoning. (And, of course, one may perform the action of taking p to be true in reasoning without actually believing that p.)18

Exercising Control in Practical Reasoning: The Place of Intention What does this suggest, then, about the belief-related events causally implicated in intentional action? It suggests that they are actions in which the agent takes the content of her belief to be true in her practical reasoning. A similar point applies to desires. Desires play a causal role in intentional action only when the agent sets herself to fulfill them. So intentions are essential to practical reasoning. (One should not overstate this point, incidentally, by requiring that desires be endorsed or identified with by being the object of a higher-order desire: the only endorsement of desire that is needed is the agents being set upon achieving the desired end or object, and one mayunhappilybe so set while alienated from the relevant desires.) So, if mental events causally implicated in intentional action are events in which the agents practical reasoning consists, then these seem to be actions, such as: taking an end as to be achieved through my action, taking to be true my instrumental belief that my end can come about only if p obtains, and thus inferring the derived intention that I bring it about that p. Accepting that intentional actions have active mental causes certainly dispels the charge that CTA leaves the agent out of the picture. (It also separates out somethough not alldeviant cases: if rationalizing mental events cause matching behaviour without passing through the agents own practical reasoning, that is a clear mark of deviance.) But, of course, it threatens to undermine the defense of reconciliatory naturalism: if actions are essential to the CTA-analysans, agent-causationism may still be viable. Now, there are two different respects in which the rational mental causes of action seem to be actional (to have the status of actions). The first is that they include intention and intention is inherently actional (intention as setting oneself to achieve an end). The second is that these causes amount to the agents own practical reasoning, in which the agent exercises her own agent-control.

What is and is not Inherently Actional about Intention Concern over the first respect can be cleared up easily. There is something intrinsically actional about an intention, but, so far as the state of intending or having an intention is concerned, the actional feature has to do entirely

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with the characteristic intentional content of that state. To have an intention is to be in the state of being set to achieve (or directed upon achieving) the intended end or object through ones own exercise of control . There is thus, as has often been observed, a self-referential element in the content of an intention, and it is this which makes a reference to action conceptually intrinsic to intention.19 I said earlier that desire gets implicated in practical reasoning when the agent sets herself to fulfill it (I could alternatively have said, when she directs herself upon achieving the desired end). These locutions are apt when the agent actively forms her intention. And CTA would indeed face a vicious regress if the only way agents could come to have intentions were through actively forming them. But that is not the only way agents come to have intentions. The state one comes to be in when one sets oneself to fulfill a desire is a kind of state one can come to be in without actually setting oneself to do anything. One can, not merely desire, but be directed upon achieving an end, without actually having directed oneself to achieve it. AndI hasten to addthis is not because some other agents direction might on occasion be needed. No, the point is that directedness upon achieving an end through ones own exercises of control is something that can come about without any agents exercise of agent-control.

Can there be Non-Intentional Actions (and might the Actions involved in Practical Reasoning be such)? Though the possibility of passive acquisition of intentions may thus be accepted, their deployment in the agents practical reasoning surely does look to be something active. So the second respect in which the antecedents of intentional action seem themselves to be actional remains. One way to avoid the threatened regress would be to allow that some actions are not intentional under any description, and so do not require a CTA-analysis and then to maintain that the mental actions involved in practical reasoning are of such a type. This would stop the regressbut in so doing open the door to agent-causationism, so this suggestion is dialectically useless if CTA is to serve to defend reconciliatory naturalism. Kieran Setiya has recently observed (2007: 24) that
According to Anscombe, an instance of action is intentional if and only if it is one to which a certain sense of the question Why? is given application; the sense is of course that in which the answer, if positive, gives a reason for acting (1963: 9). But this question is not refused application because the answer to it says there is no reason (1963: 25). Davidson denies the latter possibility: to act intentionally just is to act for reasons (Davidson [1980]: 6).

So the Anscombe-Davidson thesis is really Davidsons thesis. It draws on Anscombes insight, but rejects what her own position requires, namely that

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there be a way of grasping what it is for the relevant sense of Why? to be given application to behaviour which is not simply equivalent to there actually being an answer to that Why? question. Or, at least, Davidsons position denies that there is a way of grasping this other than by appeal to a prior (and perhaps primitive) notion of the agents exercising her own agent-control. Accordingly, if Anscombe is rightso that a persons behaviour can count as his intentional action even if it is done for no reasonCTAs battle against agent-causationism will not get off the ground: there will be such a thing as purely voluntary action which cannot be understood as constituted by behaviour with the right sort of mental cause and so could be constituted by an irreducible agent-causal relation. Now I think there is a conceptual argument that favors Davidson over Anscombe here: the idea of an agents exercise of control that is not in any respect intentional is incoherent because controlling without aiming at some end or object of control is not controlling at all. That argument may be deflected, however, by appeal to alleged counterexamples to CTAintentional actions which lack intentional explanations and (therefore also) rationalizing mental causes. Setiya sides with Anscombe, remarking that it is possible to act intentionally for no particular reason (2007: 24). Ruben draws attention to Maimonides notion of futile actions, such as idly playing with one hands (2003: 94 & 124), and Rosalind Hursthouse (1991) identifies arational actions which are nevertheless clearly intentional. Undoubtedly people often act for no particular reason, but that does not establish that one can act for no reason whatsoever. No particular reason here conversationally implies no further reason. In each of these cases the agent does act for reasons: the reasons are minimal and not worth remarking, but they are not non-existent.

Component Acts of Technically Skilled Actions Ruben thinks that the most convincing such counterexamples to CTA are individual actions performed in the course of technically skilled actions and activities, such as shaving or dancing or (my example) tying a shoelace. He defends the view that these actions have components which are themselves intentional actions. He then argues that there simply are not available all the rationalizing beliefs the agent would have to deploy for a CTA analysis to hold of each component action.20 CTA can achieve reduction, he claims, only through mental inflation or overpopulation (2003: 98). But the criteria for mental overpopulation are unclear: phenomenology is not the right guide (after all, many actions done for further reasons take place without conscious deliberation or reflective awareness of their mental antecedents). In any case, if the CTA-analysis deploys intentions, the absence of instrumental beliefs amongst an actions mental causes will not be the problem Ruben thinks it

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isand I will return to this point shortly. But, first, it is worth reflecting further on the nature of technically skilled action.

Sub-Agential Exercises of Control One has to learn how to tie a shoelace. While one is learning, some component movements undoubtedly count as deliberate actions. But once one has the skill, shoelace tying belongs to ones repertoire of basic actions one can without further reasoning carry out an intention to tie ones shoelace. Tying the lace will still have all the component movements belabored while learning, now performed smoothly and easily. But will these count as individual actions? They are certainly components of an intentional action. But that does not entail that they are themselves actions; only that they belong to what realizes the action. It is true that the skilled lace-tier will, for each of the component lace-tying movements, be likely if asked to avow that he intentionally performed it, which may suggest that each component does count as intentional action. I am not sure that this follows, however. Maybe the components are not in fact individual basic intentional actions, and what explains the agents (mistaken) avowal is the combination of his remembering that he used to have to perform each component movement intentionally, and his recognizing that he could now deliberately revert to so doing (for example, in teaching his child the skill).21 Often, deliberately recovering the components as individual intentional actions is challenging for someone who already has the skill (to show another how to tie a necktie, for example, I must stand behind him and pretend he is me). And perhaps at the limit there are some skilled actions which once learnt cannot any longer be done deliberately in component stages. (Maybe this is what happened with my first signature, which I eventually gave up because if I hesitated under the slightest stress I simply could not reproduce an accurate token?) These observations suggest that the exercise of agent-control in a complex technically skilled action may be realized by sub-agential exercises of control in making the component movements. A naturalizing account will do well, I think, to apply this insight to all exercises of agent-control. Many basic actions are learnt in infancy, and the sub-agential exercises of control that now realize those basic actions are performed by the agent herself only under special circumstances, such as while recovering from a stroke for example. But many sub-agential exercises of control which realize agency could never in principle be carried out at the level of the agents own controlfor example, the control involved in the operation of realizing neural and muscular physiological systems.22 But what of my conceptual argument? If controlling without aiming at some end or object of control is not controlling at all, that will surely apply at sub-agential levels? True, but this will not entail that each movement in a

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skilled action, let alone each manifestation of control at the various realizing cognitive psychological and physiological levels, counts as an agents action. The sub-agential systems that possess these powers of control will need teleological language to describe their operations, but they will not count as agents themselves. While the criteria for authentically agential agency are to some extent contentious, there can be little doubt that they class realizing systems of cognitive neuropsychology and physiology as fitting a homuncular functionalismthey are agent-like only, not actual agents.23 Now, there is no problem about accepting that sub-agential exercises of control can be wholly realized physically. Here theres no mind-body problem, since the use of mind-and-agency language is metaphorical though an account is needed of how teleological descriptions may properly apply in physiology and biology to systems that are not agents. But, clearly enough (for all who accept the evolutionary paradigm), there can be real teleology without real agency, and real teleology is unproblematically naturally realizable. There is a problem, though, when we come to real agencyto personal, agential, exercises of control. Here agent-causationists discern an ontological gap that can be filled only by the introduction or emergence of something novelsomething that cannot be fitted into a purely naturalist ontology. Hence naturalism requires a defense of CTA, which shows that (granted natural mentality) natural real agency is secure.

Dealing only in Intentions A common objection to CTA, then, is that there are intentional actions done for no reason. In response, CTA-proponents seem able to hold that such actions are either sub-agential or, if genuinely intentional, then still done for a reason, though not for any further reason beyond doing the action itself. And, so far as I can see, this response deals with Rubens counterexamples, which may present just this kind of a mixed bag. When we reflect on complex skilled action and its implications for the realization of agency in and through lower systems of control, we recognize, I suggest, that some types of exercise of control are always agential, some shift, according to circumstances, from agential to sub-agential or back again, while others are inherently sub-agential. How, though, will CTA deal with intentional actions not done for further reasons? And how with the mental actions apparently involved in practical reasoning? How can the CTA-proponent fend off the suggestion that at these points we have exercises of agent-control which are not plausibly realized in behaviour with suitable mental causes? Clearly, if it is to apply to actions not done for further reasons, the CTA analysis cannot require instrumental beliefs. I have already argued that the CTA analysis has to deal in intentionswhat is needed now is the recognition that, so far as basic intentional actions go, the analysis need deal only in

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intentions. The minimal rationalizing mental cause behaviour requires to be intentional action is just an intention to perform the kind of basic action that the behaviour realizes. That this is so is a lesson that emerged, I believe, from Davidsons account of akratic action, which is both intentional and recognized by the agent to be essentially surd. Davidsons account uses the notion of an all out judgment of what to do, which goes beyond an all things considered judgment (which importantly still counts as a conditional judgment of the form this is to be done, given these considerationswhat makes it all things considered is just that the considerations on which it is conditional are all the considerations that the agent takes into account). The akratic agents behaviour is reasonable with respect to his all out practical judgment (so the Anscombe-Davidson thesis is saved), even though it is unreasonable relative to his all things considered judgment. Because at the time of How is Weakness of the Will Possible?, Davidson still held that the notion of an intention was syncategorematic, he did not identify this strange animal, the all out unconditional practical judgment, for what it really isnamely an intention. But that does not alter the fact that what a Davidsonian CTA needs to accommodate akratic actions is to acknowledge that sometimes the rationalizing mental cause is no more than an intention to perform an action of a type that the caused behaviour realizes (where such an intention need not be deliberately or even consciously formed, though arguably its presence must be consciously accessible).24 That acknowledgment is just what is needed, too, to deal with Maimonidess futile actions, Hursthouses arational actions, and Rubens individual component actions of skilled activities. To take one of Hursthouses examples, hurling the recalcitrant tin-opener out of the window is my intentional action only if caused by my intention to do just that, though I acquire that intention out of sheer frustration with no further motivating reason whatsoever. Ruben complains that he cannot see that any sort of rationalization is provided by causation by an intention alone (i.e. without some belief also playing a rationalizing role).25 He is right, of course, if the rationalizing of behaviour is taken to entail that there is some (even poor) reason for the agent to perform it. But that is not the right way to interpret the rationalizing relation as required for a naturalizing CTA-analysis: all that is needed is that, relative to the salient mental cause, the caused behaviour is a reasonable thing for the agent to do.26 A CTA-analysis of basic action that deals only in (basic) intention fits that requirement: for one who intends to do a, a-ing is a reasonable thing to do. Actions Implicated in Practical Reasoning: The Appeal to Higher-Order Intentions Those who appeal to the CTA to support reconciliatory naturalism should therefore offer a CTA analysis that takes the mental cause of basic

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intentional action to be the agents having the relevant (basic) intention. Is this enough to accommodate the mental actions involved in practical reasoning? Maybe not. I rather think that, if CTA-proponents did appeal to a different particular basic intention as the cause of each distinct mental action performed in the course of practical reasoning then they would indeed overpopulate the mental.27 Far better, I maintain, is to recognize the agential status of mental acts involved in practical reasoning by appealing to standing higher-order intentions that belong essentially to the agent as a rational agentintentions which, as I have put it previously, are classifiable generally as intentions to act in accordance with the canons of practical rationality (Bishop 1997: 260). These standing intentions include, for example, (a) the intention to make reasonable judgments about what it is best to do all things considered (a highly general intention, subsuming a range of intentions to follow specific canons of practical evaluative rationalitydiscovering what these canons are is logicians business); (b) the intention to conform to what Davidson called the principle of continence, namely to form intentions in accordance with ones all-things-considered judgment of whats best to do; and (c) the intention to ensure that conflicts amongst intentions get resolved somehow, either by derivation from established evaluative priorities or some other way. Given theseand no doubt furtherhigher-order intentions, mental actions performed in practical reasoning can be exhibited as fitting a CTA-analysis: for example, when I continue work on my paper, having judged that this is whats best to do now, my forming the basic intention to sit down at the keyboard is made reasonable and caused by my judgment and my higher-order intention to conform to continence. There is no suggestion, of course, that reasoning implicating these higherorder standing intentions needs itself to be deliberate or conscious: all that is required is that it takes place. Nevertheless, such reasoning can occasionally be fully conscious and deliberate. Indeed, the fact that it can become so is, I think, good reason to regard such reasoning as involving the exercise of agential control, rather than just the operation of some sub-agential system. Heres an example. Afurtherhigher-order intention constitutive of being a practical rational agent is that one intend to take to be true in practical reasoning what one saliently believes to be true. But one may consciously modify this higher-order intention: for example, one might come to intend not to take ones belief that p to be true in salient reasoning if, on reflection, one has come to recognize that one holds this belief purely as a result of prejudice. Thus, recognizing that my belief that this man wearing suede shoes is not to be trusted results from a prejudice about suede-shoe wearers I have inherited from my father, I take care to deal with him as favorably as I would anyone else, defusing, so to speak, my ill-grounded belief. Here I reason quite consciously about how to conduct practical reasoning that typically proceeds automatically (where this adverb is to be read so as to cancel the implicature in the fashion of an automaton).

68 John Bishop

Ruben has, I think, misunderstood the scope of this suggested appeal to higher-order intentions: I mean it to apply just to the kind of mental actions that take place in practical reasoning. I do not mean to apply it to mental actions generally. Thus, Rubens complaint that some mental actions do not seem to involve high-falutin higher-order intentions at all is ignoratio elenchi.28 Those higher-order intentions are indeed high-falutin, since our use of them becomes clear only through sophisticated reflection. But many cases of mental action require no reference to these, or any other, high-falutin intentionsincluding Rubens own cases.29 When I evaluate potential escape routes, for example, this mental action is caused by my intention to save my life and the belief that my life is in danger unless I escape, which then causes and rationalizes my intending to escape. That intention, along with the instrumental belief that to escape Ill need an escape route that doesnt equally threaten my life, together cause me to evaluate potential escape routes. No problem with applying the general CTA-analysis here, it seems. And Rubens example of trying to solve a crossword clue having resolved to put the matter out of my mind as a bothersome distraction is, of course, a case of akrasia: the mental act of thinking again about how to solve the clue is caused and rationalized by a basic intention to do so, arising (from some non-rational cause) contrary to my all things considered judgment about what to do. Again the CTA analysis appliesthough (as noted) Ruben does not think well of the kind of account needed here, namely, an account that deals only in intentions. But, as already explained, that disapproval results from a (natural enough) misunderstanding about CTAs rationalization requirement.

Basic Action as the Agents Carrying Out His or Her Basic Intention One might yet be concerned that the proposed CTA-analysis of basic intentional action remains implicitly circular and so leaves the specter of agent-causationism unexorcised. For, surely, the agent needs to carry out his basic intention in order to act? Surely it is still up to the agent to a (or not) even though he does have the basic intention to a? I have mentioned the importance of distinguishing between the state of believing and the action of taking the proposition believed to be true in reasoning. Similarly, I have stressed the difference between desiring an end, and employing the content of that desire in practical reasoning (a circumlocution for intending to achieve the end). So, too, surely, we need to distinguish between the state of having an intention, and the actual employment of the content of the intention in reasoning? In which case, the agents having the basic intention to a still leaves it up to the agent to use that intention in his reasoning. Employing ones basic intention in ones reasoning can, I think, be nothing less than acting as intended. (Here we connect, I think, with

Exercising Control in Practical Reasoning 69

Aristotles view that the conclusion of practical reasoning is the action itself.) It is undeniable, however, that we can conceive of a gap between the agents basically intending to a and his a-ing. Indeed, this must be so given the conceptual ontology of action for which an agent-causal relation (of bringing about, carrying out) is ineliminable. If we remain at the folk psychological level of description, no matter how hard we try we are never going to get any folk psychologically describable state or states of the agent which count as causally sufficient for the agent to do a. In particular, the agents basically intending to a is not going to be causally sufficient for her a-ing. Yet, if and only if the agent does intentionally a (so the CTA-analysis maintains), the agents basic intention to a will non-deviantly cause her a-ing behaviour, where non-deviance mustand, hopefully canbe cashed in ways that do not require commitment to fundamental ontologically irreducible agent-causation. It is important that the CTA-analysis is not committed to the causal sufficiency of the agents basic intention to a for her a-ing behaviour. Perhaps there will beand perhaps naturalism says there must besome causally sufficient conditions for her a-ing behaviour to occur, but it is mistaken to suppose that these conditions (if such there are) can be displayed at the folk-psychological level, or, a fortiori, to interpret the CTAanalysis as so displaying them. The CTA-analysis is silent about whatever it is that triggers the dispositional state of basically intending to a so as to yield an a-ing, though it is committed to there being some such triggering, ultimately at the level of the physical realization of agency. What the CTA-analysis seeks to assure us is that what we think of folk psychologically as the agents carrying out his basic intention to a may reasonably be understood as wholly realized in sub-agential systems, ultimately wholly physically realized. As I suggested in Part I, the CTA-analysis functions as a mediating schema that allows one to see that the agents a-ing intentionally ( = exercising her own agent-control in a-ing, = carrying out her own basic intention in a-ing) can be wholly realized in physical states and events. If the CTA-analysis does succeed in providing conditions involving folk psychological states and events that are both necessary and sufficient for the agent to perform the basic action of a-ing, then it serves as a bridge between the openly agent-causal description of an exercise of agency and an in principle available physical description of what constitutes or realizes that exercise of agency (assuming physicalism about mental states, anyway). With a successful CTA-analysis in hand we may at least be sure that the conceptual agent-causal ontology of agency is not, as such, a block to the inclusion of actions wholly within the natural order as understood under a contemporary scientific metaphysics.30 Notes
1. See Agency, Essay 3, in Davidson 1980. There is no implication, of course, that unintentional actions are impossibleonly that an agents unintentional action

70 John Bishop must have been done with some intention (I flip the switch with the intention to illuminate the room, and so unintentionally alert the prowler). When an (untoward) outcome comes about independently of the agents exercise of control, questions that presuppose responsibility, including the question of an excuse, simply fail to apply. Some may prefer, however, to put the point by distinguishing between the global excuse that ones untoward behaviour was not even ones own action, and the kinds of detailed excuses that accept that one was exercising ones own control but in a manner or under circumstances which block fair blame. My use of the term agent-causation thus carries no implication that the object of the relation of agent-causation lies outside the ordinary chain of causality. That a bodily movement, for example, is agent-caused does not entail that it is not also event-caused, on my na ve usage. Compare Roderick Chisholm (1966), for whom agent-causation does carry this entailment. David-Hillel Ruben (2008) has recently challenged the claim that every action has an intrinsic eventan event of a kind necessary to its occurrence, but capable of occurring without there being any action. It is not to the immediate point, however, to engage with Rubens argument, since what matters here is just the idea that agent-causation has the agent as its subject. Indeed, there are no irreducible substances, unless, perhaps, space-time itself can be treated as the one substance. Compare Michael Thompson: What Aristotle could take for granted is often problematic and disorienting for us. For him the pursuit of practical philosophy did not pose metaphysical problems. (2008:10). E.J. Lowe has argued that only agentsor, at least, only substancesare causes: events as such are causally impotent (2008: 4). That view does not undermine the notion of event-causation as here outlined, however, since an event-cause must not be thought of as itself exercising a causal power to produce its effect. In event-causation, the necessitation that intuitively belongs to an efficient cause is elevated to apply to the level of regularities and transformed into the notion of a natural law. For my earlier discussion see Bishop 1989; the term reconciliatory naturalism is introduced at p. 5. See Dennett 1987. Donald Davidson, though a hero of reconciliatory naturalism, would not endorse this argument from animal agency, since he holds that only language users can be intentional agents. See Thought and Talk, in Davidson 2001: 155171. For my own criticisms of Davidsons central argument in this article, see Bishop 1980. See Actions, Reasons and Causes, Davidson 1980: 16. For a recent exposition and defense of a neo-Aristotelian understanding of agency as a causal power, see Stout 2007. Pure Mathematics, by comparison, is, on a realist view, a science of purely abstract reality. We should say, then, that being in principle open to physical explanation is what defines the concrete natural orderthere is no need to deny that reality as a whole may include abstracta. Supernatural connotes not merely belonging outside the concrete natural order but in some sense being above it, e.g., by having power over (aspects of) it, or by counting as a higher kind of being than anything natural.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

Exercising Control in Practical Reasoning 71 14. In fact, the possibility of non-physical creatureliness may be harder to defend than it seems, since something has to be the medium of a creatures dependence on its creator, and whatever that is will arguably be functionally equivalent to the physical. 15. See Bishop 2010. 16. Some philosophers maintain that the deviance problem is easily resolved. For example, Kieran Setiya has recently claimed that in the case of basic action, the crucial concept is that of guidance: when an agent s intentionally, he wants to , and this desire not only causes but continues to guide behaviour towards its object (2007: 32), and it is this guidance condition, he thinks, that excludes deviance. Compare also Frederick Adams claim that intentions not only initiate (trigger) their effects but they sustain and causally structure their effects (1997: 296). Though this may be a phenomenologically satisfying way of distinguishing genuine intentional action from its deviant counterpart, it fails to meet the requirements of a CTA-analysis that aims to secure reconciliatory naturalism: arguably, appeals to guidance or to sustaining by an intention succeed only because these are or imply agent-causal notions. 17. See Davidson 1980: 1213. 18. Recognizing the difference between the state of holding a belief and the act of using its content in reasoning not only helps with puzzles over doxastic voluntarism, it also highlights the distinction between questions about the epistemic status of beliefs (as mental states), and questions about a persons epistemic entitlement to perform the action of taking a proposition to be true in reasoning. This distinction is helpful in the externalism/internalism debate in epistemology: epistemic externalists may be correct to claim that a belief-state may have high epistemic status just in virtue of how it has been caused; but this may be acknowledged consistently with maintaining an internalist insistence that entitlement to take a belief to be true in reasoning rests on the satisfaction of conditions accessible to the believer. 19. Compare Setiyas model of desire-like beliefs which he identifies with intentions (and which feature in his explanation of the link between Anscombes knowledge without observation thesis and her claim that intentional action is that to which a certain sense of the question Why? has application). See Setiya 2007: 4856. 20. Ruben allows that there might be enough dispositions to believe, but follows Audi in stressing the distinction between dispositions to believe and dispositional beliefs (2003: 119124 & 12930). 21. See Rubens references to Dennett and Hornsby (2003: 134), who maintain that, once a skill is established, the components involved in its exercise are individual intentional actions, but are guided at the sub-personal level. 22. Even if an agent gains scientific knowledge about the operation of these systems, so that he knows that, for example, when he ties his shoelace certain muscles must contract in given ways, he will not suppose he contracted those muscles intentionally. He will be in a position to get those muscles contracted as a nonbasic intentional actionnamely, just by tying his shoelacesbut contracting those muscles will never count as an exercise of his direct control qua personal agent. 23. For a defence of a homuncular functionalist philosophy of mind, see Lycan 1987.

72 John Bishop 24. See Davidson, How is Weakness of the Will Possible?, Essay 2 in Davidson 1980. 25. See Ruben 2003: 109. 26. I grant that the very term rationalization encourages the kind of misunderstanding I here attribute to Ruben: proponents of CTA would do better, I think, to speak simply of match between caused behaviour and the content of the operative mental causes. 27. It does seem implausibly inflationary to suppose that each belief whose content gets employed in practical reasoning has to be accompanied by a basic intention to take just that belief to be true. 28. See Ruben 2003: 152. 29. See Ruben 2003: 1489. 30. I am grateful for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper to the participants in the SOFIA conference on the philosophy of action held at Huatulco Beach, Oaxaca State, Mexico, 810 January, 2010, and especially Aguilar. to my commentators, Fred Adams and Jesus

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