Online research in philosophy

The problem of ‘wayward causal chains’ threatens any causal analysis of the concept of intentional human action. For such chains show that the mere causation of an action by the right sort of belief and/or desire does not make the action intentional, i.e. one done in order to attain the object of desire. Now if the ‘because’ in ‘wayward’ action-explanations is straightforwardly causal, that might be argued to indicate by contrast that the different ‘because’ of reasons-explanations (which both explain and justify) is non-causal. Myles Brand, in Intending and Acting (1984), resists this conclusion, but argues that waywardness shows that philosophers must ‘naturalize’ action theory by drawing on contemporary work in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. I argue that this is a misconceived response to the problem of waywardness: in Brand’s work action theory itself has gone astray, unsure which way to tum next.

This commentary discusses critically the proposal of Foxall's intentional behaviorism that, when the use of intentional categories can be justifiably portrayed as heuristic overlay to theories incorporating radical behaviorist principles, intentionality may be part of behaviorist interpretations of behavior that occurs outside of the controlled conditions of the laboratory and practical behavioral interventions. I sketch an argument that typical uses of intentional categories for the explanation of human agency (e.g., its exercise in conducting scientific research) are not properly grasped as being such heuristic overlay and so are not illuminated by behaviorist interpretations.

Two of the leading contenders to explain behavior are radical behaviorism and intentionality: an account that seeks to confine itself to descriptions of response–environment correlations and one that employs the language of beliefs and desires to explicate its subject matter. While each claims an exclusive right to undertake this task, this paper argues that neither can be eliminated from a complete explanatory account of human behavior. The behavior analysis derived from radical behaviorism is generally sufficient for the prediction and control of behavior in the laboratory and its applications, but it fails to provide an explanation of behavior since it cannot deal with the personal level of explanation, the continuity of behavior, and the delimitation of behaviorist interpretations. Only the inclusion of intentional terms can achieve these ends. An intentional account cannot succeed, however, without the incorporation of a behavioral criterion for the ascription of intentional content based on the analysis of systematic environment–behavior relationships. This paper proposes an overarching philosophical framework for the analysis and interpretation of behavior that incorporates both radical behaviorism and intentional psychology in a model, "intentional behaviorism," that additionally links the explanation of behavior to neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Finally, the paper proposes a link between the philosophical framework of intentional behaviorism and the world of empirical science by describing a tentative model of research, "super-personal cognitive psychology," that shows how the disparate elements previously discussed impinge upon psychological investigation.

According to the standard account of actions and their explanations, intentional actions are actions done because the agent has a certain desire/belief pair that explains the action by rationalizing it. Any explanation of intentional action in terms of an appetite or occurrent emotion (which might appear to be an explanation solely in terms of desire) is hence assumed to be elliptical, implicitly appealing to some appropriate belief. In this paper, I challenge this assumption with respect to the "arational" actions of my title---a significant subset of the set of intentional actions explained by occurrent emotion. These actions threaten the standard account, not only by forming a recalcitrant set of counterexamples to it, but also, as we shall see, by undercutting the false semantic theory that holds that account in place.

B. F. Skinner's claim that "operant behavior is essentially the field of purpose" is systematically explored. It is argued that Charles Taylor's illuminating analysis of the explanatory significance of common-sense goal-ascriptions (1) lends some (fairly restricted) support to Skinner's claim, (2) considerably clarifies the conceptual significance of differences between operant and respondent behavior and conditioning, and (3) undercuts influential assertions (e.g., Taylor's) that research programs for behavioristic psychology share a "mechanistic" orientation. A strategy is suggested for assessing the plausibility of Skinner's broader claims about the adequacy of the operant behaviorist program for the analysis of purposive behavior.

Foxall's intentional behaviorism is supposed to provide explanation and understanding where radical behaviorism provides only prediction and control. Foxall does identify empirical and conceptual issues with the operant reinforcement framework, but he underestimates the extent of its flaws and partly misidentifies their nature. His intentional behaviorism suffers from conceptual difficulties, and its adherence to a form of instrumentalism may actually make it harder to understand intentional phenomena.

I discuss two ways in which emotions explain actions: in the first, the explanation is expressive; in the second, the action is not only explained but also rationalized by the emotion's intentional content. The belief-desire model cannot satisfactorily account for either of these cases. My main purpose is to show that the emotions constitute an irreducible category in the explanation of action, to be understood by analogy with perception. Emotions are affective perceptions. Their affect gives them motivational force, and they can rationalize actions because, like perception, they have a representational intentional content. Because of this, an emotion can non-inferentially justify a belief which in its turn justifies or rationalizes an action; so emotions may constitute a source of moral knowledge.

Psychologists distinguish between intentional systems which have beliefs and those which are also able to attribute beliefs to others. The ability to do the latter is called having a `theory of mind', and many cognitive ethologists are hoping to find evidence for this ability in animal behaviour. I argue that Dennett's theory entails that any intentional system that interacts with another intentional system (such as vervet monkeys and chess-playing computers) has a theory of mind, which would make the distinction all but meaningless. This entailment should not be accepted; instead, Dennett's position that intentional behaviour is best predictable via the intentional stance should be rejected in favour of a pluralistic view of behaviour prediction. I introduce an additional method which humans often use to predict intentional and non-intentional behaviour, which could be called the inductive stance.