The 13th biennal collective intentionality conference — august 9–21, 2021
Well-Intentioned Self-Delusion about Collective Goals
What is the best philosophical explanation of how agents who profess a commitment to a collective goal can be mistaken about their own intentions? People regularly profess a commitment to act towards a collective goal. They may believe in social justice. They may believe that they will be the first to promote justice when suitable means arise. However, when these opportunities are presented, they do not take them, citing opportunity costs or concerns about the efficacy of action.
If this is a persisting pattern of conduct, the natural thing to say is that this person is either dishonest about their real commitments or holds mistaken beliefs about their avowed intentions. How must we conceive of the nature of human intentional agency to make this intuition intelligible? Here, I discuss three approaches to intentional agency that draw on distinctive strains in the philosophy of action: (1) a cognitivist approach; (2) an inferentialist approach; and (3) a planning theoretic approach.
I conclude that only a combination of the latter two approaches shows promise. A cogntivist interpretation of means-ends coherence makes first-person authority about certain cognitive commitments inscrutable. An inferentialist approach helps to clarify the kind of inferences about future action that are often sanctioned by practical knowledge of the contents of one’s own mind. The planning theory, by clarifying the rationality of commitment, explains the defeasibility of such inferences and makes intelligible how it is that otherwise well-intentioned people can sometimes lack the intentions that they thought they had.
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Hey Julian, here’s another question that occurred to me as I was writing up the other one. It struck me that one hypothetical way in which people might end up not living up to their intentions while still having them is for them to get in a situation a bit similar to a horse-promising problem.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with horse-promising problems, but they were often discussed by medieval logicians. The scenario is that I go to a horse-trader and I pay them some money in return for a horse. Then I go to the stable and I point out one of the three horses that are there. “Not that one”, the trader says. I point to another one. “Not that one”, the trader says. I point to the last horse. “Not that one”, the trader says. “What gives?” I say. He says: “Well, I promised you *a* horse, but I didn’t promise you *that* horse, nor *that* horse, nor *that* horse. The logical challenge is to explain what has gone wrong here, and to figure out what you should say to the horse-trader to rationally compel them to give you a horse.
We can assume that agents who commit to collective goals often don’t have worked-out plans about how they’re going to make their contribution to the collective goal; they have partial plans (as Bratman would put it) that need filling in along the way. So what they believe about themselves might be that they intend to take *some* effective means towards the collective goal when the opportunity arises. But then whenever any particular opportunity arises, they think “not this one”. They firmly believe that they intend to take *some* means towards that goal at some point, but as it so happens every particular occasion looks to them more trouble than it’s worth. Now, it seems to me that there is something going wrong with this agent, and it looks vaguely similar to what goes wrong with the horse-trader. But it does seem that an agent like this could correctly believe that they have an intention to act towards the collective goal.
Hi Julian, thanks for the talk! Just reposting my question here.
Initial version: while I agree that the cognitivist, Anscombian approach here is a non-starter with respect to this explanatory challenge, it wasn’t immediately clear to me that it was essential to take an approach that combined inferentialism and a planning-theoretic approach, as opposed to an approach that relied entirely on resources from the planning-theoretic approach. Although Bratman might not say much about it himself, one might think that being in the kind of joint intention state that Bratman describes would by itself licence the kinds of inferences that we want to be able to draw here; in particular, we might suggest that the kinds of rational connections between intention and belief that we need to underwrite the inferences in question could be written into the functional role of joint intention.
Follow-on version: there are potentially two different ways in which we might say that we need to bring in the the inferentialist account as well as the planning-theoretic account.
I can imagine one scenario in which we identify something Bratman doesn’t address but the inferentialists do, and then, inspired by inferentialism, we find a way to address it using the basic resources that Bratman presents us with. So let’s say the inferentialists have catalogued some kinds of inferences that we ought to be allowed to make about our intentions, and then we take those and give a Bratmanian explanation of why we are entitled to those inferences. So that would be to use inferentialism as the proverbial ladder we climb and then throw away.
The other scenario is that by looking at inferentialism, we identify some inferences that we ought to be allowed to make about our intentions, and then we find that Bratman’s resources give us no way of explaining how we’re entitled to those. So then what we end up doing is combining Bratman’s account with some additional explanatory resources (whatever those look like) from the inferentialists.
One way of rearticulating my original question is that it seemed to me that you were suggesting that we should do the latter, but it wasn’t yet clear to me that we couldn’t do the former.
I think I asked another question in the Q&A but I don’t remember now what it was – if I remember I’ll post it.