Abstract
How do we know what our intentions are? It is argued that work on self-knowledge has tended to neglect the attitude of intention, and that an epistemological account is needed that is attuned to the specific features of that state. Richard Moran’s “Authorship” view, on which we can acquire self-knowledge by making up our minds, offers a promising insight for such an account: we do not normally discover what we intend through introspection. However, his formulation of the Authorship view, developed primarily with the attitude of belief in mind, is found wanting when applied to intention. An alternative account is proposed for knowledge of one’s own intentions that gives a central role to the mental act of deciding what to do. It is argued that we can come to know what we intend by making a decision about what to do and self-ascribing the content of that decision as our intended action.
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Notes
For example, Nichols and Stich (2003) defend an introspection-based view that posits two distinct monitoring mechanisms, one for phenomenal states and one for propositional attitudes.
Here I have in mind Evans (1982), sometimes called the ‘Ascent Routine’ view, and Moran (2001), sometimes called the ‘Authorship View’. Peacocke (2003) also suggests that his view of “consciously-based belief-ascription” might apply pari passu to intention, but does not himself develop this idea there.
For a nice statement of the special authoritative features first-personal attitude reports are held to exhibit, see Wright (2001), Part III.
As Davidson (1970) famously argues.
Op. cit., p. 101.
The term “transparency” originally comes from Moore (1903), though there it specifically refers to the transparency of perceptual states to the objects of perception. To be clear, the notion of transparency employed here is not the Cartesian idea that one’s mental states are incorrigibly self-intimating to their subject.
Shah and Velleman (2005) argue that doxastic deliberation must be so answered: “The deliberative question whether to believe that P inevitably gives way to the factual question whether P, because the answer to the latter question will determine the answer to the former. That is, the only way to answer the question whether to believe that P is to answer the question whether P.”
Moran (2001, p. 56). Although Moran refers here to what he will do next, rather than what he intends to do next, it is clear from the context that he means to be referring to knowledge of his intention.
Byrne (2011) proposes a slightly different transparency-based account of knowing one's intentions inspired by Evans and Anscombe (1963). On his view, knowledge that one intends to ϕ is transparent to one's non-evidential knowledge that one will ϕ. That is, if one knows that one will ϕ, and this knowledge is not based on sufficient evidence, one may infer that one intends to ϕ. This proposal deserves its own discussion, but I will not address it here.
For a discussion of the question of uniqueness and epistemic permissibility, see White (2005).
Of course, from an external perspective, we can make further assessments as to whether the belief is in fact true and whether the judgment was one the thinker was justified in making. But from the first-person point of view, these questions are not separable from the deliberative question of whether P is true.
Wallace (2001, p. 94) makes this point.
Jonathan Way (2007) offers a similar argument against the transparency of intention, developed independently.
In this it is closer to Aquinas’s concept of electio than Aristotle’s concept of prohairesis.
I realize the phrase ‘reasonably possible’ is unsatisfyingly vague, but I do not know how to specify just how possible one must take the action in question to be. One should probably be more confident than merely thinking it not impossible, but I do not think it is necessary to consider the action a sure thing (though there is a great deal of disagreement about this).
See Mele (2000) for a discussion of whether intentions are usually required actionally (by making a decision) or non-actionally. Mele attributes the view that deciding to ϕ is simply a non-actional matter of acquiring an intention on the basis of practical reflection to Brian O’Shaughnessy, and the view that some intentions arise non-actionally out of unopposed desires to Robert Audi.
Here I have in mind, among others, H. P. Grice, Robert Audi, and Wayne Davis.
Thanks to Michael Bratman for helping me to articulate this point.
I am indebted here to Peacocke’s theory of consciously-based self-ascriptions of belief (Peacocke 2003).
As Frankfurt (1991) poetically puts it, quoting Henry IV.
The question of whether one can mistakenly believe one has an intention one does not have has become a subject of serious debate in the literature on practical reason, in the context of discussing whether the Instrumental Norm (‘take the known necessary means to your intended ends’) is at bottom a norm of practical reason or theoretical reason. My observations here may have some relevance for this debate, although I won’t explicitly follow out this thread.
Wallace’s argument is essentially that an unconscious state could not shape further deliberation in the manner characteristic of the functional role of intention, and that a belief that one has a certain intention will start to play this role, making it the case that one does in fact intend.
A final complication must be added to the account, for there is a sense in which we do not intend everything we decide to do. Let’s make a rough generalization about the object of decision, which is certainly too broad to be quite right, but that captures an intuitive thought: what we decide on is what to aim at and how to achieve those aims through the actions we take to be in our power—the means, if you will, although ‘means’ should be understood very broadly to include not only instrumental means, but also more precise specifications of an end or specific actions that befit us in light of some broader pattern of our lives. In making these decisions about aims and means, thinking of them as such, we undertake to guide our thought and action in a way that tracks this practical structure, and this is what amounts to forming an intention.
However, there is also a sense in which decision carries with it something broader than this: the acceptance of certain consequences of our actions that we do not aim at or track with our thought and action, but that we are resigned to living with. We do not usually limit our practical deliberation to thinking about what to aim at and how to get it, in abstraction from how what we want might be intertwined with the rest of the causal order. Rather, we often go some way toward fleshing out a scenario in which we execute a potential action plan, considering the likely side effects of this course of action and the alternative, perhaps undesirable descriptions our actions may thereby come under. And if we decide to proceed with our plan, this decision is in some sense in favor of bringing about the whole foreseen scenario. This does not mean that one intends the whole scenario; what one intends, as I’ve said, is the part one undertakes to guide one’s thought and action by. But insofar as one foresees significant consequences of pursuing a given course of action, deciding to proceed is knowingly opting to bring about the whole package and live with the consequences.
This understanding of the object of choice as the whole foreseen scenario is significant for a number of reasons—for instance, for debates over the ethical distinction between intended and double effect. For the enquiry into knowing what we intend, however, the relevant focus is the narrower part of the content of the decision that excludes foreseen side effects. What we intend is the end we have undertaken to realize and the means we have opted for in order to do so, represented to oneself as such. I think there is much more to say about how the distinction is made in thought between the intended practical structure and what one merely foresees one will bring about, but that is a topic for another paper (I attempt to make some progress on this in Paul (2011). Here it must suffice to say that the content of the intention one is entitled to self-ascribe will depend on further distinctions in the structure of the representation that is the object of the decision.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Michael Bratman and Krista Lawlor for numerous conversations and detailed comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Nadeem Hussain, John Perry, Tamar Schapiro, Lanier Anderson, David Hills, Mark Crimmins, James Genone, Micah Lewin, Ben Wolfson, and audiences at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and USC.
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Paul, S.K. How we know what we intend. Philos Stud 161, 327–346 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9741-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9741-2