“That is just what they want you to believe”: A modest defence of Marxist paranoia

This essay defends a rational reconstruction of a genealogical debunking argument that begins with the premise “that's just what the economic elite want you to believe” and ends in the conclusion “you should lower your confidence in your belief.” The argument is genealogical because it includes a causal explanation of your beliefs; it is debunking because it claims that the contingencies uncovered by the genealogy undermine your beliefs. The essay begins by defending a plausible causal explanation of your belief in terms of the wants of the elite. Then a number of recent objections to genealogical debunking arguments are considered. It is argued that the genealogy offered in the first part constitutes evidence that a testimony‐based belief is not safe and therefore does not constitute knowledge if the economic elite wants you to believe it.     

Explaining Action by Emotion

I discuss two ways in which emotions explain actions: in the first, the explanation is expressive; in the second, the action is not only explained but also rationalized by the emotion's intentional content. The belief–desire model cannot satisfactorily account for either of these cases. My main purpose is to show that the emotions constitute an irreducible category in the explanation of action, to be understood by analogy with perception. Emotions are affective perceptions. Their affect gives them motivational force, and they can rationalize actions because, like perception, they have a representational intentional content. Because of this, an emotion can non–inferentially justify a belief which in its turn justifies or rationalizes an action; so emotions may constitute a source of moral knowledge.     

Williamson on Knowledge and Psychological Explanation

According to many philosophers, psychological explanation canlegitimately be given in terms of belief and desire, but not in termsof knowledge. To explain why someone does what they do (so the common wisdom holds) you can appeal to what they think or what they want, but not what they know. Timothy Williamson has recently argued against this view. Knowledge, Williamson insists, plays an essential role in ordinary psychological explanation.Williamson's argument works on two fronts.First, he argues against the claim that, unlike knowledge, belief is``composite' (representable as a conjunction of a narrow and a broadcondition). Belief's failure to be composite, Williamson thinks, undermines the usual motivations for psychological explanation in terms of belief rather than knowledge.Unfortunately, we claim, the motivations Williamson argues against donot depend on the claim that belief is composite, so what he saysleaves the case for a psychology of belief unscathed.Second, Williamson argues that knowledge can sometimes provide abetter explanation of action than belief can.We argue that, in the cases considered, explanations that cite beliefs(but not knowledge) are no less successful than explanations that citeknowledge. Thus, we conclude that Williamson's arguments fail both coming andgoing: they fail to undermine a psychology of belief, and they fail tomotivate a psychology of knowledge.     

Agent causation as a solution to the problem of action

My primary aim is to defend a nonreductive solution to the problem of action. I argue that when you are performing an overt bodily action, you are playing an irreducible causal role in bringing about, sustaining, and controlling the movements of your body, a causal role best understood as an instance of agent causation. Thus, the solution that I defend employs a notion of agent causation, though emphatically not in defence of an account of free will, as most theories of agent causation are. Rather, I argue that the notion of agent causation introduced here best explains how it is that you are making your body move during an action, thereby providing a satisfactory solution to the problem of action.     

Intentions and Causes, Actions and Right Actions

I argue in this essay that belief/desire explanations are not logically true and not causal, and further that the antecedent of a true belief/desire conditional cannot be strengthened in such a way as to transform it into a true causal statement. I also argue that belief/desire explanations are not dispensable: they are presupposed in our justifications of scientific claims. The proposal is not that psychological determinism is false, but that some at least of our activities are not describable in causal terms. These arguments prepare the ground for a puzzle. If all human intentional behaviour is caused, then all actual linkages between psychological states and behaviour should be expressed in causal statements. But neither the action of asserting a causal statement nor the action of justifying the assertion can be described as the result of a cause. Therefore if one accepts that scientific claims can be justified, not all linkages between psychological states and subsequent action are expressible in causal statements. I do not offer a solution to this puzzle.     

The Enkratic Requirement

Abstract: Agents are enkratic when they intend to do what they believe they should. That rationality requires you to be enkratic is uncontroversial, yet you may be enkratic in a way that does not exhibit any rationality on your part. Thus, what I call the enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic in the right way. In particular, I will argue that it demands that you base your belief about what you should do and your intention to do it on the same considerations. The idea is that, if you base your belief and your intention on different considerations, then you are inconsistent in your treatment of those considerations as reasons. The enkratic requirement demands that you be enkratic by treating considerations consistently as reasons.     

Reasons Explanation: Further Defense of a Non-causal Account

If moral responsibility requires uncaused action, as I believe, and if a reasons explanation of an action must be a causal explanation, as many philosophers of action suppose, then it follows that our responsible actions are ones we do for no reason, which is preposterous. In previous work I have argued against the second premise of this deduction, claiming that the statement that a person did A in order to satisfy their desire D will be true if the person, while doing A, intended of that action that it contribute to satisfying their desire D, a condition that does not entail any causal connection between the explaining desire and the explained action. This claim has received trenchant criticism from Randolph Clarke. The main part of the present paper responds to Clarke’s latest objections. The rest of the paper addresses another worry about my account (not raised by Clarke): does my non-causal sufficient condition hold as widely as it needs to if responsible, uncaused actions are as widespread as we would like to think?     

Action explanation and its presuppositions

In debates about rationalizing action explanation causalists assume that the psychological states that explain an intentional action have both causal and rational features. I scrutinize the presuppositions of those who seek and offer rationalizing action explanations. This scrutiny shows, I argue, that where rational features play an explanatory role in these contexts, causal features play only a presuppositional role. But causal features would have to play an explanatory role if rationalizing action explanation were a species of causal explanation. Consequently, it is not a species of causal explanation.     

Updating without evidence

Sometimes you are unreliable at fulfilling your doxastic plans: for example, if you plan to be fully confident in all truths, probably you will end up being fully confident in some falsehoods by mistake. In some cases, there is information that plays the classical role of evidence—your beliefs are perfectly discriminating with respect to some possible facts about the world—and there is a standard expected-accuracy-based justification for planning to conditionalize on this evidence. This planning-oriented justification extends to some cases where you do not have transparent evidence, in the sense that your beliefs are not perfectly discriminating with respect to any non-trivial facts. In other cases, accuracy considerations do not tell you to plan to conditionalize on any information at all, but rather to plan to follow a different updating rule. Even in the absence of evidence, accuracy considerations can guide your doxastic plan.     

Retrospective construction of the judgement of free choice

The problem of free will lies at the heart of modern scientific studies of consciousness. Some authors propose that actions are unconsciously initiated and awareness of intention is referred retrospectively to the action after it has been performed [e.g. Aarts, H., Custers, R., & Wegner, D. M. (2005). On the inference of personal authorship: Enhancing experienced agency by priming effect information. Consciousness & Cognition, 14, 439-458]. This contrasts with the common impression that our intentions cause those actions. By combining a stop signal paradigm and an intentional action paradigm we show that participants sometimes indicate to have intentionally initiated an action while reaction time data strongly suggest that they in fact failed to stop the action. In a second experiment we demonstrate that the number of trials in which participants misattributed their awareness of intention varied with the intentional involvement during action planning. Our data support the retrospective account of intentional action. Furthermore, we introduce an experimental approach that objectifies introspective judgments of awareness of intention.     

MONKEYS, TYPEWRITERS, AND OBJECTIVE CONSEQUENTIALISM

There have been several recent attempts to refute objective consequentialism on the grounds that it implies the absurd conclusion that even the best of us act wrongly. Some have argued that we act wrongly from time to time; others have argued that we act wrongly regularly. Here I seek to strengthen reductio arguments against objective consequentialism by showing that objective consequentialism implies that we almost never act rightly. I show that no matter what you do, there is almost certainly something else you could do that would have even better consequences. If objective consequentialism is true, the ratio of the number of your right actions to the number of your wrong actions is very close to zero.     

Intentionality and temporal binding: Do causality beliefs increase the perceived temporal attraction between events?

Intentional motor actions and their effects are bound together in temporal perception, resulting in the so-called intentional binding effect. In the current study, we address an alternative explanatory mechanism for the emergence of temporal binding by excluding the role of motor action. Employing a sensory-based Libet clock paradigm, we examined temporal perception of two different auditory stimuli, and tested the influence of beliefs about the causal relationship between the two auditory stimuli, thus simulating a crucial feature of intentional action. In two experiments, we found a robust temporal repulsion effect, indicating that instead of being attracted to each other, the auditory stimuli were shifted away from each other in temporal perception. Interestingly, repulsion was attenuated by causal beliefs, but this effect was fragile. Furthermore, temporal repulsion was unaffected by the intensity of prior learning. Findings are discussed in the context of intentional action awareness research and multisensory integration.     

Can We Be Self‐Deceived about What We Believe? Self‐Knowledge,Self‐Deception,and Rational Agency

Abstract: This paper considers the question of whether it is possible to be mistaken about the content of our first‐order intentional states. For proponents of the rational agency model of self‐knowledge, such failures might seem very difficult to explain. On this model, the authority of self‐knowledge is not based on inference from evidence, but rather originates in our capacity, as rational agents, to shape our beliefs and other intentional states. To believe that one believes that p, on this view, constitutes one's belief that p and so self‐knowledge involves a constitutive relation between first‐ and second‐order beliefs. If this is true, it is hard to see how those second‐order beliefs could ever be false. I develop two counter‐examples which show that despite the constitutive relation between first‐ and second‐order beliefs in standard cases of self‐knowledge, it is possible to be mistaken, and even self‐deceived, about the content of one's own beliefs. These counter‐examples do not show that the rational agency model is mistaken—rather, they show that the possibility of estrangement from one's own mental life means that, even within the rational agency model, it is possible to have false second‐order beliefs about the content of one's first‐order beliefs. The authority of self‐knowledge does not entail that to believe that one believes that p suffices to make it the case that one believes that p.     

Laws,causality and the intentional explanation of action

Whether or not an intentional explanation of action necessarily involves law-like statements is related to another question, namely, is it a causal explanation? The Popper-Hempel Thesis, which answers both questions affirmatively, inevitably faces a dilemma between realistic and universalistic requirements. However, in terms of W.C. Salmon’s concept of causal explanation, intentional explanation can be a causal one even if it does not rely on any laws. Based on this, we are able to refute three characteristic arguments for the claim “reason is not a cause of action,” namely, the “proper logical” argument, the “logical relation” argument, and the “rule-following” argument. This rebuttal suggests that the causal relationship between reason and action can provide a justification for intentional explanations.     

The intentionality of intention and action

Cognitive Science is likely to make little progress in the study of human behavior until we have a clear account of what a human action is. The aim of this paper is to present a sketch of a theory of action. I will locate the relation of intention to action within a general theory of Intentionality. I will introduce a distinction between prior intentions and intentions in actions; the concept of the experience of acting; and the thesis that both prior intentions and intentions in action are causally selfreferential. Each of these is independently motivated, but together they enable me to suggest solutions to several outstanding problems within action theory (deviant causal chains, the accordian effect, basic actions, etc.), to show how the logical structure of intentional action is strikingly like the logical structure of perceptions, and to construct an account of simple actions. A successfully performed intentional action characteristically consists of an intention in action together with the bodily movement or state of the agent which is its condition of satisfaction and which is caused by it. The account is extended to complex actions.     

Intentions in the Light of Goals

This paper presents a systematic analysis of the various steps of goal-processing and intention creation, as the final outcome of goal-driven action generation. Intention theory has to be founded on goal theory: intentions require means-end reasoning and planning, conflict resolution, coherence. The process of intention formation and intentional action execution is strictly based on specific sets of beliefs (predictions, evaluations, calculation of costs, responsibility beliefs, competence, etc.). The origin of an intention is not necessarily a “desire” (which is just a kind of goal). Intention is a two-layered goal-structure: the intended action(s) to be executed, and the intended outcome motivating that action—with two distinct kinds of “failure”. This belief-goal perspective also allows to examine two stages/types of intention, and the relations and differences between intention “in agenda” (future directed) and intention under execution (intention in action). I will argue that the will is much more than the intention driving an intentional action. I will also claim that intentions are not there just for motivating and regulating intentional actions (from the motor level to more complex behaviors), but that they play also several other important roles.     

How to deal with your most difficult client—You

Conclusion Therapists are human-and, believe it or not, fallible humans. Ideally, they are supremely well infored, highly confident, minimally disturbed, extremely ethical and rarely under- or overinvolved with their clients/Actually, they are hardly ideal. If you, as a therapist, find yourself seriously blocked in your work, look for the same kind of irrational beliefs, inappropriate feelings, and dysfunctional behaviors that you would investigate in your underachieving clints. When you ferret out the absolutistic philosophies and perfectionist demads that seem to underlie your difficulties, ask yoursell—yes,strongly ask yourself—these trenchant questions: (a) Why do Ihave to be an indubitably great and unconditionally lowed therapist?; (b) Where is it written that my clientsmust follow my teachings and absolutelyshould do what I advise?; (c) Where is the evidence that therapymust be easy and that Ihave to enjoy every minute of it?If you persist in asking important questions like these and insist on thinking them through to what are scientific and logical answers, you may still never become the most accomplished and sanest therapist in the world. But I wager that you will tend to be happier and more effective than many other therapists I could—but charitably will not—name. Try it and see!This article is adapted from an invited address presented at the 91 st Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association at Anaheim, Calif., August 1983.     

Children's beliefs about instances of mechanical and electrical causation

Two main questions were asked regarding young children's beliefs about causal mediation: What sorts of beliefs about causal mediation are reflected by children's incomplete explanations of causal situations? In particular, do children hold a false belief in action at a distance or do they realize that something must mediate between cause and effect? When presented with a non-visible connection between cause and effect (Experiment I), the children's incomplete (Piagetion Stage 1) explanations either reflected the correct expectation of a mediating connection or else merely reflected identification of the causal agent and no concern one way or another with the issue of causal mediation. This was also the case when the mediating connection was visible and present at the outset (Experiment II). In neither experiment (both of which involved mechanical causation) was there evidence of a false belief in action at a distance. A third experiment involved instances of electrical causation in order to maximize the chances of tapping a false belief. The rationale was that, in their everyday lives, although children do have first-hand experience with the mediating connection in instances of mechanical causation, they do not have such experience with instances of electrical causation. The results from the third experiment were analogous to the results in the other two. It was concluded that, with respect to instances of physical causality, young children do not hold a false belief (in action at a distance) that is later relinquished. Rather, their concerns are, at first, restricted to identifying the causal agent and do not include any beliefs, true or false, about the issue of causal mediation. When they eventually do deal with the question of causal mediation, children hold approximately correct beliefs. In terms of school situations, these findings suggest a shift from providing the child with disconfirming data that will aid him in relinquishing his false beliefs to providing him, instead, with additional data that will supplement his existing, approximately correct beliefs.     

Believing For a Reason

This paper explains what it is to believe something for a reason. My thesis is that you believe something for a reason just in case the reason non-deviantly causes your belief. In the course of arguing for my thesis, I present a new argument that reasons are causes, and offer an informative account of causal non-deviance.