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Three-and-a-half folk concepts of intentional action

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Abstract

Fiery Cushman and Alfred Mele recently proposed a ‘two-and-a-half rules’ theory of folk intentionality. They suggested that laypersons attribute intentionality employing: one rule based on desire, one based on belief, and another principle based on moral judgment, which may either reflect a folk concept (and so count as a third rule) or a bias (and so not count as a rule proper) and which they provisionally count as ‘half a rule’. In this article, I discuss some cases in which an agent is judged as having neither belief nor desire to bring about an action, and yet laypersons find the agent’s action to be intentional. Many lay responses apparently follow a rule, but many other seem biased. The contribution of this study is two-fold: by addressing actions performed without desire or belief, it expands Mele and Cushman’s account; it also helps discriminate between a two-rules and a three-rules theory. As a conclusion, I argue in favor of a three-and-a-half concepts theory.

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Notes

  1. At the time of writing, no other experimental philosopher was employed at the institution where the author was employed.

  2. For an introduction, see: Nadelhoffer and Nahmias (2007) and Knobe and Nichols (2008).

  3. In what follows I will therefore employ “concept(s)” and “rule(s)” interchangeably.

  4. Mele and Cushman (2007, p. 186) asked “did the hunter intentionally shoot the bird watcher?” and elicited responses on a 1–7 scale (where 1 is a strong no and 7 is a strong yes). They counted as ‘yes’ and ‘no’ respectively the responses ≥5 and ≤3.

  5. See Beebe and Buckwalter (2010) for a dissenting view.

  6. The participants were asked: “According to you, the CEO harmed/helped the environment… a) intentionally, b) not intentionally, c) neither; and then: According to you, for his decision, the CEO should be… a) praised, b) blamed, c) neither.”

  7. This figure is also different from that of the respondents who said that the chairman did not intentionally harm the environment in Cushman and Mele’s (2008, p. 176) experiment based on the original vignette (i.e., 5% when the question was asked at the beginning of the experiment and 27% when the question was asked towards the end of the experiment). At any rate, direct comparisons between these studies should be avoided, because they differ under several respects, and so the differences may be attributable to a plurality of causes.

  8. Knobe’s (2003) original paper features a second scenario that mirrors the chairman scenario and in which a lieutenant sends a squad of soldiers to take control of a hill. Doing so, he disregards whether they move into/out of the enemy’s line of fire and hence whether some of the soldiers will be killed/rescued; he only cares about controlling the hill. The lieutenant explicitly declares: “Look, I know that they’ll be in/taken out of the line of fire, and I know that some of them will be killed/would have been killed otherwise” (Knobe 2003, pp. 192–193, emphasis added). The intentionality asymmetry (i.e., 77% in harm and 30% in help) is similar to that in the chairman scenario. See Beebe and Buckwalter (2010, p. 478n) acknowledge that “because of the structural similarity of the corporate and military cases, one might have expected that subjects would automatically assume the chairman knew his company’s new program would have the stated consequences.” Surprisingly, they find this not to be the case.

  9. Note that the chairman in this vignette does not say that he doesn’t care at all about the environment (Pellizzoni et al. 2010, p. 203), as in the other vignettes discussed here. This difference may be responsible for (lower degrees of blame and hence) lower attributions of intentionality.

  10. The reader could see Nadelhoffer (2006a, b) and Mele and Cushman (2007, p. 194) for a discussion of the influence of various degrees of confidence on lay judgments of intentionality.

  11. In a trial version of this experiment, some respondents (N = 12) were asked whether they thought the CEO was ‘very confident’, instead of simply ‘confident’, that harm would occur. 66.7% said that the harm was intentional, 91.7% said that the CEO was not very confident, and those who said both that the harm was intentional and the CEO not very confident were 58.3%. (One respondent did not answer the intentionality question and said that the CEO was not very confident.) In another trial (N = 11), the question asked was whether the CEO ‘anticipated’ the harm. The same number of respondents (72.7%) said that the harm was intentional and that the CEO did not anticipate the harm. 63.6% said both that the harm was intentional and that the CEO did not anticipate the harm.

  12. The difference in the responses to the first question (i.e., did the CEO intentionally harm the environment?) in the ‘confident’ and in the ‘think’ treatments is not significant: χ2 (1, N = 74) = 0.1953, p = 0.70. Also the difference in the responses to the second questions (i.e., was the CEO confident/did the CEO think that the environment would be harmed?) is not significant: χ2 (1, N = 74) = 0.0210, p = 0.90.

  13. The single phenomenon view of intentionality is associated with Bratman (1987). Turner (2004) and Hindriks (2008) invoked it as an explanation of the Knobe Effect.

  14. This review was deliberately kept brief, and so incomplete. The competence/performance distinction is now conventional in the literature (e.g., Nichols and Ulatowski 2007; Nado 2008). See Feltz (2007) for a different classification and for a broader review.

  15. For the full text of the vignettes, see Cushman and Mele 2008, pp. 183ff.

  16. Cushman and Mele (2008, pp. 182–183) recommend further testing of these rules and of the hypotheses about their prevalence among laypersons.

  17. A consistent investigation of whether MB should count as rule or as bias requires that there be a uniform opinion of what counts as moral bad. Clearly, such assumption can be granted only on occasion. Such uniformity will not be needed for my account below.

  18. In what follows I refer to the finding of Lanteri (2009), because they include both intentionality attributions and moral judgments.

  19. For a more elaborate discussion of the single phenomenon view and the Knobe Effect, see Hindriks (2008) and my comment (Lanteri 2009).

  20. There is evidence (Knobe and Mendlow 2004; Sverdlik 2004; Phelan and Sarkissian 2008) that a bad outcome in itself does not explain asymmetric attributions of intentionality, but maybe a morally bad outcome does.

  21. This expectation rests on the assumption that judgments of blameworthiness operate as a reliable proxy for moral bad.

  22. For critiques of experimental philosophy see: Sosa (2007), Kauppinen (2007), Liao (2008), and Cullen (2010). However imperfect, the methods of experimental philosophy will prove relatively more useful for investigating certain domains of philosophical inquiry: those in which the opinions of the folk matter the most, like moral and political philosophy (Mele 2003).

  23. This proposal may be more accurately regarded as a three-rules theory, with bias. I chose the ‘three-and-a-half’ label as a way of acknowledging the paternity of the original idea. See also Sousa and Holbrook (2010).

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Acknowledgments

This article was written in part when the author was a Research Scholar at the TINT program, at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Helsinki (Finland). An earlier version of this paper has benefited from comments by Joshua Knobe and Alfred Mele. The author is grateful to an anonymous referee of this journal for several insightful suggestions.

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  1. POLIS, Faculty of Political Science, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Via Cavour 84, 15121, Alessandria, Italy

    Alessandro Lanteri

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Lanteri, A. Three-and-a-half folk concepts of intentional action. Philos Stud 158, 17–30 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9664-3

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