Actions and De Re Beliefs

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Actions and De Re BeliefsAuthor(s): Thomas McKaySource: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Dec., 1984), pp. 631-635Published by: Canadian Journal of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40231393 .

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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Volume XIV, Number 4, December 1984

Actions and De Re Beliefs

THOMAS McKAY, Syracuse University

I want to present some evidence that facts about de re attitudes or causal facts are important in the explanation of actions. In particular, I will argue that an attempt by Ernest Sosa and Mark Pastin [4] to give a scheme for explaining intentional actions fails. By adding either de re or causal locutions we can devise a more adequate schema for explaining action, but their analysis had been designed to eliminate de re locutions from explanations of intentional action. Showing the failure of their analysis does not, of course, show that de re or causal elements are required in these explanations, since it does not rule out the possibility of alternative explanatory schemes. But the centrality of de re or causal elements is supported by the inadequacy of their attempts to dispense with them.1

1 Much recent work has assumed or argued that explanations of action are in-

dependent of relation to objects. Cf . [3), pp. 12, 18-20. Also [2], p. 526:

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Thomas McKay

When an explanation of an action involves an attribution of a de re belief, there are generally two forms in which we can give it. To explain why Smith reaches for a particular salt-shaker, we can say:

(El) Smith believes it to be a salt-shaker. Since he wants salt and believes it to be suitably placed for the satisfaction of his desire by reaching, he reaches for it.

We could also say, roughly equivalently:

(E2) The salt-shaker on the table is a (perceptual) cause of Smith's belief that there is something on the table that is suitably placed for satisfaction of his desire by reaching. So he reaches.

Sosa and Pastin propose an explanatory scheme that employs no attributions of de re attitudes (and no causal concepts) but which they con- tend to be adequate in explaining intentional actions whenever de re attributions are adequate. This would guarantee the eliminability of de re attributions from the context in which they seem most important. Lack- ing other reasons for making de re attributions, we could then regard them as dispensable.

Their explanatory scheme for intentional action is the following: S grabs x intentionally if and only if there is a property F of x and some basic action B such that

The main purpose of assigning objects of attitude is, I take it, to characterize states of the head; to specify their causal roles with respect to behavior, stimuli, and one another. ... Mean what you will by "object of an attitude." But if you mean something that is not determined by the state of the head, and that cannot do the job of characterizing states of the head by their causal roles, then I think you had better introduce something else that can do the job. I would prefer to reserve the term "object of an attitude" for that something else.

But suppose Smith and Jones grab for the same salt-shaker (call it 'George'), and Twin-Earth Smith and Twin-Earth Jones grab for the same Twin-Earth salt- shaker ('Ralph'). Smith and Jones share a belief and behave the same way as each other (grabbing George, the object they believe to contain salt). Smith and Twin- Earth Smith share the same state of the head, but differ in beliefs (Smith believes George contains salt and has no beliefs about Ralph) and differ in behavior (Smith grabs George and Twin-Earth Smith grabs Ralph). The view that the object of an attitude corresponds to the state of the head involves a substantial revi- sion of our practice in attributing beliefs.

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(a) F locates x for S to grab by performing B

(b) F motivates S to grab x by performing B.

F locates x for S to grab by performing B if and only if

(a) Fx

(b) S believes that by performing B he would grab the F.

F motivates S to grab x by performing B if and only if

(a) Fx

(b) S wants to grab the F by performing B.

The accounts I gave ([El] and [E2]) share some elements of the Sosa- Pastin account; in particular, the idea that explanation of action must be in terms of a property F that locates an object and motivates actions towards the object. But their analysis fails because it omits a critical ele- ment - S must believe x to be F for this to explain S's action. If x is F and

S believes some other object, y, to be F, S will have a belief about y, not

xf and he will act with the intention of grabbing y, not x. (If he grabs x it

is by accident, not by intention.) Alternatively, we could say that in order for this analysis to work, x

must be the cause of S's relevant beliefs. If some object y causes his

beliefs, he will act with the intention of grabbing y, not x.

Suppose that a red pepper mill (r) had been on the table to Smith's

left, Smith saw it, and Smith took it to be a full salt-shaker. Now the pepper mill is moved to the right and a yellow salt-shaker (y) is placed to

Smith's left, but Smith notices none of this switching and has not

previously seen y. Smith now grabs left for the object he believes to be there (the pepper mill he mistook for a salt-shaker). He unintentionally grabs the object that is now there - fortuitously, a salt-shaker, though not the object Smith believed would be there.

The conditions of the Sosa-Pastin example are fulfilled. The property of being a salt-shaker to the left (F) is such that

(i) the salt-shaker has F

(ii) S believes that by reaching left he would grab the F

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Thomas McKay

(iii) S wants to grab the F by reaching left.

Thus, according to the Sosa-Pastin analysis (reading [ii] and [iii] in the purely de dicto way required), Smith grabs salt-shaker y intentionally.

But this is wrong. The red pepper mill is the object Smith was think- ing of, and he wanted to pick up that object (because of his mistaken belief that it was a salt-shaker). He had no desires concerning y. The salt- shaker y plays no role in explaining his action. Its role in his success was adventitious. Smith's beliefs were about r; he had r in mind.

The locution 'Smith grabbed y intentionally' is subject to a large number of readings. Smith grabbed (reached out and grasped) intentionally; and it was Smith's intention that he grab some salt-shaker or other. But there was no salt-shaker such that Smith intended to grab it. In particular, y was not such that Smith intended to grab it (although y happened to be the thing Smith grabbed), y's being a salt-shaker plays no role in explaining Smith's actions because it plays no role in bringing about his beliefs or directing his action. It is Smith's belief about r that directs Smith's action.

If a cigar butt had been placed to his left instead of y's being placed there, Smith would have grabbed the cigar butt (intending that he pick up some salt-shaker and intending to pick up r). Presumably Sosa and Pastin would not wish to say that the cigar butt was something he intended to pick up. But his luck - he got a salt-shaker by accident - cannot be relevant to the claim thay y was the object he intended to pick up. y is an object of a kind such that he desired that he pick up something of that kind. But not every salt-shaker is something he wants to pick up, and there is nothing special about y that wouldn't have also distinguished the cigar butt in accounting for why he did that action.

If this needs further argument, we can imagine y to be a lethal salt- shaker. When grabbed it kills its possessor. Smith might know of the ex- istence of such salt-shakers, though he has never seen one and knows that all and only yellow salt-shakers have this property. Assured by the observed redness of r, he reaches out, intending to grab r, but grabs y and dies. The Sosa-Pastin analysis says that Smith grabs y intentionally.

To correct this to give an account of Smith's reaching out with the intention of picking up r, we need to make a change. We could replace (i) by

(i') the peppermill r is believed by S to be F

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thus reintroducing a de re locution and destroying the attempted elimination. Or we could replace (i)-(iii) with the following:

(iv) The pepper mill r caused (in the right way) S's belief that by reaching left he would grab something F

(v) Grabbing something F is thought by Smith to be a suitable way to satisfy one of his desires.

Either a de re locution (i') or a causal one (iv) seems necessary. Thus this attempt to show that de re attitudes are not necessary in ex-

plaining action has failed.2 Elimination in favor of de dicto attributions is not possible, at least not in the way they suggest. Although I have not ruled out the possibility of alternative explanatory schemes lacking both de re and causal elements, the fact that Sosa and Pastin's attempt fails to eliminate them is some evidence that at least one of these concepts is cen- tral in explanations of action. The fact that causal locutions may serve as well as de re attributions suggests that a causal analysis of the de re may be possible, but that is an entirely different project from the one propos- ed by Sosa and Pas tin.

May, 1981

2 This confirms Feldman's point in [1] to which Sosa and Pastin were responding.

References

[1] Richard Feldman, 'Actions and De Re Beliefs/ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8

(1978) 577-82

[2] David Lewis, 'Attitudes De Dicto and De Re/ Philosophical Review 87 (1979) 513-43

[3] John Perry, The Problem of the Essential Indexical/ Nous 13 (1979) 3-21

[4] Ernest Sosa and Mark Pastin, 'A Rejoinder on Actions and De Re Belief/ Canadian

Journal of Philosophy 11 (1981) 735-9

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Actions and De Re Beliefs