Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency

The Role of Intentional Strength in Shaping the Sense of Agency

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Cambridge University Press Michael Bratman Stanford University. This collection of essays by one of the most prominent and internationally respected philosophers of action theory is concerned with deepening our understanding of the notion of intention. In Bratman's view, when we settle on a plan for action we are committing ourselves to future conduct in ways that help support important forms of coordination and organization both within the life of the agent and interpersonally.

These essays enrich that account of commitment involved in intending, and explore its implications for our understanding of temptation and self-control, shared intention and shared cooperative activity, and moral responsibility. This collection will be a valuable resource for a wide range of philosophers and their students. Identification Theories in Philosophy of Action. Edit this record. Mark as duplicate. Find it on Scholar. Request removal from index.

Revision history. Google Books no proxy Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server Configure custom proxy use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy. Configure custom resolver. Chapters BETA. Martin J.

Peter Carruthers - - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 2 Eric Schwitzgebel - - Philosophical Studies 7 Rethinking Relational Autonomy. Andrea C. Westlund - - Hypatia 24 4 I Intend That We J. Cambridge University Press. Roughley - - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 9 2 Structures of Agency: Essays.

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Bratman - - Oxford University Press. Shared Intention and Reasons for Action. Caroline T. Arruda - - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 45 6 Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason.

Philosophy of Mind

Pollock proposes to construct a cardinal measure indirectly, on the basis of a "quantitative feel" of a comparative preference relation among four arbitrarily chosen situations; he thinks that humans can introspectively tell whether they prefer situation B to situation A more than they prefer situation D to situation C. Further mathematical manipulation, combined with some assumptions about the preference relation, will produce from these data a cardinal measure allowing for unique comparisons of expected likabilities.

Feature-likings are a shortcut required by constraints of time and resources. Theoretically, a rational agent could work out by reasoning what features of situations are causally relevant to their being liked or disliked. In practice, the agent has to act before having time to go through the elaborate reasoning that would be required and to accumulate the experience needed as inputs to such reasoning.

Pollock speculates 20 that humans acquire feature-likings through their ability to imagine situations which must be types rather than tokens and respond conatively to them; equally speculatively, we can conjecture that humans recognize directly in a token situation those aspects of it which they like or dislike-but perhaps what appears to be immediate recognition is a product of learning. Parenthetically, Pollock notes that there could be a rational agent for whom feature-likings are fundamental; such a rational agent would need, Pollock argues, both a cardinal measure of primitive feature-likings and a way of computing a liking for combinations of features from the likings of individual features Primitive desires encode goals and initiate planning.

Goals, construed as combinations of features, are required for planning by limitations of time and resources. Starting with a specific goal is necessary for efficient interest-driven epistemic reasoning, as opposed to a time-consuming random generation and evaluation of plans.

A plan which can attain a goal can be presumed to have a positive expected value if the expected likability of the goal's combination of features is greater than the expected likability of the situation that would otherwise result. But this presumption can be defeated by other features of the situation that results from carrying out the plan. Humans have such optative dispositions to try to alleviate hunger, avoid pain and pursue pleasure. Conditioning can lead to new optative dispositions.

In a fully practically rational agent, reasoning that a desired goal is unsuitable would extinguish the desire, and reasoning that a goal is suitable would produce a desire for it; Pollock notes drily that humans are not fully rational in either of these respects. Instrumental desires are produced by adoption of a partial plan for example, getting this paper to the editor of this issue by the promised deadline as a way of achieving the goal of his including it in the issue ; such desires initiate further planning.

Present-tense action desires are needed to initiate action, since adopted plans may leave the scheduling of steps indefinite. Action-initiating desires may be produced by optative dispositions or by the adoption of a plan.

When present-tense action desires conflict, an agent will act on the strongest of these desires. Thus a rational agent will proportion the strength of such a desire derived from an adopted plan to the expected likability of the tail of the plan, that part of it which remains to be carried out.

Pollock seems to assume that the strength of desires produced by optative dispositions e. But this assumption seems implausible; a human being may for example have a fierce desire to drink or eat what is in front of him or her and a weak desire to postpone the satisfaction of this desire for example in an extreme situation where survival requires rationing a limited supply.

There seems to be a need in a fully practically rational agent to override a strong present-tense action desire due to an optative disposition in the light of a rationally based judgement that some alternative action has greater expected value; Pollock 35 seems to assume that such reasoning would dispel the suboptimal desire in a fully rational agent, but overriding it would also seem to be rational.

A great strength of Pollock's model is its recognition that desires are not the ultimate canon of appeal in practical reasoning. Contrary to Hume, a desire can be subject to rational criticism, on the ground that satisfaction of the desire will produce a situation less to the agent's liking than some alternative option. This point is a matter of common sense once it is articulated; it is implicit, for example, in the common recognition that people in the grip of a harmful addiction would be better off if they did not have the desire for the addictive experience.

Addicts often recognize this fact themselves. Philosophical theories of practical reasoning, perhaps under the influence of Hume, have tended not to allow for it.

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They have recognized that pleasant and painful experiences cause desires and aversions; see for example Aristotle's On the Soul III. But Hume in particular left no room for the rational assessment of desires according to the pleasure to be gained from satisfying them. Aristotle does have a theory of correct and incorrect desires, but exploration of his theory would take us too far afield. A further strength of Pollock's theory is his use of the degree to which a token situation is likable as the ultimate touchstone of practical reasoning, rather than appealing to how pleasant or painful the situation is to the agent.

Pollock's formulation is better in two respects. First, the concepts of pleasure and pain are too easily construed simply in terms of gratification of the appetites connected with the senses of touch and taste.

Such comforts and delights are certainly some part of living a good life, but they are not the whole of it. Pollock's theory, unlike Mill's, does not prescribe any particular hierarchy of situations. But, in taking personal situation-likings as basic, it allows each agent to accommodate the preference expressed by Mill. Second, Pollock's theory appeals not to how much an agent actually likes a token situation but to how much the agent would like the situation if the agent's relevant beliefs were correct.

Thus token situation-likings become subject to rational criticism in terms of the correctness of the beliefs which produce them.

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Recognition of this sort of rational criticism in a theory of practical reasoning is not new; even Hume acknowledged it, in his case with reference to "passions", i. But it is less common to allow it in a theory which takes as basic some analogue to Pollock's situation-likings. Without the reflex reaction of withdrawing one's hand immediately from painful contact with a flame or similarly hot object, human beings would find the world much less to their liking than they now do.

Similarly with the inclination to eat when one feels hungry. As Pollock himself points out , all kinds of evaluative attitudes other than situation-likings are subject to evaluative rational criticism, i. Instrumental desires can be criticized by evaluating the plan from which they are derived.

Primitive desires, whether produced by optative dispositions or by ratiocination, can be criticized on the ground that the goal they encode does not have a high relative expected value. Present-tense action desires can be criticized if they arise from adoption of a plan by evaluating the plan from which they are derived or if they arise from an optative disposition by arguing that fulfilling them does not contribute to living a good life, in the sense of a life in which the agent's situation-tokens are more likable than otherwise.

Further, as Pollock also points out, not all reasoning is epistemic; here he explicitly dissents from Hume. Pollock's model includes three types of non-epistemic state transitions which are subject to rational evaluation: a from beliefs about the expected situation-likings of potential goals to desires adoption of goals , b from beliefs about the relative values of plans to intentions adoption of plans , and c from choosing the strongest present-tense action desires to actions.

An obvious objection to Pollock's model is that it requires a cardinal measure of situation-likings. While one can assign such numbers to a computational simulation of a rational agent, human beings clearly do not consciously associate with their awareness of their present situation some number which measures how much they like it. Pollock does suppose, quite plausibly I think, that human beings have a "quantitative feel" for how much they like a given situation which permits a certain comparative ordering.

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