Institut Jean Nicod
CNRS-ENS-EHESS
Carl Ginet has proposed to define action as being intentional if and only if its agent simultaneously has a de re intention to be doing that very action. Ginet does not exactly tell us what makes an attitude like intention de re (or, in his terms, directly referential); rather, he takes the notion of de re attitude for granted. The gist of my paper is to show that the standard picture of direct reference allows for cases in which the conditions in Ginet's definition are met, yet we would not say that the agent intended to act as she did. And the intuitive reason why the action would not count as intentional is that the agent's intentions were not directed at her action "in the right way." Ironically, it is the problem of deviant causal chains, initially targeted against the causal theory of action, which Ginet's "acausal" theory was precisely designed to avoid, that turns out to be a problem for Ginet's own account - only now, the deviant chain goes from the action to the intention.
The aim of my paper is to explore the limits of Ginet's account of intentional action.[1] I will present a case in which an action that, intuitively, is not intentional, is predicted by his account to be intentional, thus revealing a more general problem for his approach. But let me start with an outline of the account itself. For the sake of exposition, instead of using variables for individuals and actions, like S, X, A, I will be talking of arbitrary agents, like John, myself, and the actions of raising hands and dancing.
Suppose that John intentionally raises his hand, in order to vote at a meeting. Ginet's proposal is driven by the desire to reconcile these two ideas:
a) John's raising of his hand does not have to be determined by the previous state of affairs. Given a complete account of John's beliefs and desires and all the events that had occurred up to the time of his action, it was still up to John to raise his hand rather than not raise it.
b) John's raising of his hand was not a random happening, as an accidental muscle spasm would have been. It was a genuine action that John did for a reason, namely, to vote.
Ginet offers his indeterministic account of action in response to the dilemma of free will.
When John raised his hand, it was still in his power to do otherwise. If his action had been determined by the previous state of affairs, it is unclear how he could be justifiably held responsible for his action. At the same time, John did what he did for a reason, in order to vote. If John had not intended to raise his hand, e.g. if he had been forced do it, or if he did it because of some unexpected muscle contraction, it is similarly unclear how we could hold him responsible.
Instead of replicating Ginet's definitions word for word, let me adapt Ginet's suggestion and focus on the basic case. Intentional action may be defined as follows:
Def 1. I intend to raise my hand if and only if as I am raising it, I have some directly referential intention about the raising of my hand, such as the intention that by doing it I will express my vote.
The notion of intention, qua a kind of attitude, will be taken for granted. My concern will bear on the relation between the intention and the intended action. What makes an intention be about an action? Ginet does not tell us much on what it takes for an attitude to be "directly referential." His position seems to be something like, "pick up your favorite view of direct reference, plug it into my definitions, and you will get the acausal account of intentional action." So, what views of direct reference are there on the market? Surprisingly enough, there does not seem to be much competition. Marginal questions set aside, the "best-seller" is the Kripkean-Kaplanian view, well-established in natural language semantics. I will show that when we plug the standard view into Def. 1, the resulting account of action, although accurate most of the time, fails in certain cases. Read more...
[1] The main reference is Carl Ginet, "Reasons Explanation of Action: An Incompatibilist Account", Philosophical Perspectives 3 (1989): 17-46.