Abstract
In the center of this paper is a phenomenological claim: we experience ourselves in our own doings and we experience others when we perceive them in their doings as active in the sense of being a cause of the corresponding physical event. These experiences are fundamental to the way we view ourselves and others. It is therefore desirable for any philosophical theory to be compatible with the content of these experiences and thus to avoid the attribution of radical and permanent error to human experience. A theory of ‘subject causation’ according to which the active subject continuously and simultaneously causes physical changes is sketched. This account is—according to the phenomenological claim defended—compatible with the content of our daily experiences in doing something and in observing others in their doings and it has a number of further more theoretical advantages: it does not touch the autonomy of neurophysiology and it is compatible with a thesis of supervenience of the mental on the physical. It does however require a weak version of subject-body dualism.
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Notes
I will use the terms ‘doings’ and ‘activities’ in an interchangeable manner.
I tend to think that there is always—in fact or even necessarily—some phenomenal awareness of every doing. To notice one’s own doing, however, requires more than phenomenal awareness. While talking, a person’s attention might be caught by her interlocutor’s objection in such a way that she does not notice her own arm movements although she is at the same time phenomenally aware of moving her arms.
For more about the distinction between being active and controlling see Sect. 3 below.
Mere doings are not in the focus of contemporary philosophical investigation. Most philosophers rather reflect about the specific case of actions or even more specifically about rational action. But there are exceptions: cases of mere doings play a central role in the objections against John Searle’s claims about ‘intention in action’ in Wakefield and Dreyfus (1991). Doings overlap with what is called minimal actions by Bayne (2007) following Bach (1978).
It might be doubted that our being active in doing something is always phenomenally present during every activity. If we are caught in conversation then we might not notice that we scratch our head. Still it may be argued that the activity is phenomenally present at least in a vague way. But the claim will be controversial. The argument of this paper in no way depends on the assumption that we are always aware of being active in our doings.
The notion of control in the sense of being able to intervene is crucial for Harry Frankfurt’s theory of agency (see Frankfurt 1978). What has just been said implies that the notion of being active in the sense here at issue cannot be capture by Frankfurt’s notion of control.
Here I agree with Terry Horgan’s phenomenological claims in his paper for this volume, Sect. 1, §5–§7 and with the phenomenological claims in Horgan et al. (2003, p. 329).
This claim is obviously true for intentions that precede the movement. However, with respect to what John Searle has called ‘intentions in action’ the claim may be doubted (compare Searle 1983, Chap. 3, Sect. VII). A clarification of this point would need a discussion of the relation between the notion of being active here at issue and Searle’s notion of intention in action which I have to leave to another occasion.
For very similar remarks compare Horgan et al. (2003, p. 328).
It should be noted that our emotional reaction to others is in many cases based on seeing them as active. Watching a squirrel would not be emotionally touching if we did not see it as being active in what it does. It is hard to imagine how we could observe another person in her doings with a loving feeling if we did not see him or her as active in the relevant sense.
More directly to the point it might be objected on the basis of empirical evidence such as the well-known experiments by Wegner that we are often under an illusion when we believe ourselves to be the author of an action. On a closer look, however, these results have no impact on the phenomenological aspect here at issue. The subjects in Wegner’s experiential setting have to estimate their own contribution to a movement that is produced (or appears to be produced) by the interaction of the activity of two agents. There is evidence that this estimation can be influenced by factors that have nothing to do with the real contribution of the estimating subject which is an interesting result in its own right but has no impact on the present case of experiencing oneself as active. The subjects at issue would rightly experience themselves as being active in their doing (there is no doubt that they do something when following the instructions) independently of the extent to which they can be tricked into error when asked to estimate their own contribution to the resulting movement under the special circumstances of the experiment. (See Wegner and Wheatley 1999; Wegner 2002.)
For a discussion of the issue about the veridicality conditions of this aspect of the phenomenology of agency compare Horgan et al. (2003, p. 335). They consider an alternative to the view that the veridicality of the experience of immanent causation requires agent causation: according to that view, for a person to be the cause of her own movements consists in the movement being caused by the right kind of preceding mental events. Therefore, even though the causation of the movement by mental events is not phenomenally present—given this reductive analysis of what it is to be a cause of one’s own movements—the veridicality conditions of the experience of immanent causation would not require immanent causation in the metaphysical sense. However, when considering doings in general as opposed to the special case of actions this proposal looses much of its plausibility. We experience ourselves as active in many doings where there does not seem to be any plausible candidate for a mental event as a preceding cause (consider the example of moving your gaze without reason from the window on your left to the window on your right during a journey by train).
To avoid misunderstandings of these claims compare Sect. 6, last paragraph.
Agent causation is restricted to the case of moral choices in Campbell (1976).
I am not claiming here that every case of attending is an activity and is experienced as caused by the attending subject. Sometimes our attention is caught by something quite passively. In these cases it need not appear to us as if we were actively upholding attention to the object at issue.
For a discussion of whether agent causation requires subject dualism see O’Connor (2002, Sect. 2.2).
Unfortunately the chosen name does not make it clear enough that any theory identifying the subject with some part of the body is intended to be excluded.
For a more extended discussion of subject-body dualism see my book (2006, Chap. 5). (An English translation is in preparation.) One often cited problem is the puzzle about how non-material substances can have causal impact on material things. Jaegwon Kim has developed a version of this objection against any substance dualist theory in Chap. 3 of his new book (Kim 2005). This objection will be discussed in my review of the book (in preparation for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research).
Other aspects of the issue about the relation between subject causation and mental event causation are addressed in my paper (2006b, Sect. 6).
Different possibilities have been proposed by agent causation theorists; for a brief overview see O’Connor (2002, Sect. 2.4).
I owe my awareness of this problem to Katia Saporiti who raised a similar objection after my talk at the meeting in honor of Ansgar Beckermann (July 2005, department of philosophy, Bielefeld).
Compare in particular his recent formulation of the argument in Kim (2005, Chap. 3).
It is often assumed that the claim of metaphysical supervenience characterizes materialism. In my view this is a mistake. Metaphysical supervenience is compatible with a dualist position. See also Horgan (2006, Sect. 1) about this issue.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Kati Balog, Ansgar Beckermann, Max Drömmer and Barry Loewer for discussions about the topic of mental causation that greatly helped me to develop a clearer view about the position I am sketching in the present paper. I owe important insights to the critical comments of two referees of this journal that motivated several corrections and additions. I would like to thank Michael Mitchell for linguistic corrections.
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Nida-Rümelin, M. Doings and Subject Causation. Erkenn 67, 255–272 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9064-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9064-z