Abstract
What I shall do in this paper is to propose an analysis of ‘Agent P tries to A’ in terms of a subjunctive conditional, that avoids some of the problems that beset most alternative accounts of trying, which I call ‘referential views’. They are so-named because on these alternative accounts, ‘P tries to A’ entails that there is a trying to A by P, and therefore the expression ‘P’s trying to A’ can occur in the subject of a sentence and be used to refer to a particular, namely an act or event of trying. A conditional account such as mine avoids having to answer questions about those alleged particulars, for example their location and their causal relation to physical actions, or alternatively their identity to physical actions. In brief, the analysis I propose eschews any need to quantify over any sort of trying particulars. I both clarify the proposal and deal with five possible objections to it: (1) metaphysically impossible actions: (2) cases of finking and reverse-cycle finking; (3) the empirical emptiness of preventers and blockers; (4) proximate intentions and trying; and (5) alleged explanatory loss.
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Notes
I have argued against the idea that a trying can be identified with any physical action in Ruben (2015).
I have also given a fuller defense of the desirability of a non-referential strategy in Ruben (2013).
As Gideon Yaffe does in his Completion Counterfactual. Yaffe (2010, 94).
In the case of basic action, we do not normally speak of the skill required to do a basic act. But it is literally true that we normally do have the skill to perform our basic actions. Just as with non-basic actions, skill in the case of basic actions does not always lead to success. If I try to raise my arm but something prevents or blocks me so that I fail to raise it, I do have the skill required to raise my arm even though I do not succeed in doing it.
If one can have the skill required to do a basic action, it must be true that one can fail to have that skill. And this is indeed so. I am in the fortunate position of knowing how, having the skill, to wiggle my ears, which is a basic action for me. But if you are not one of the cognoscenti, you unfortunately don’t have the skill to do it.
Actually, Yaffe takes as the LHS of his biconditional ‘the [relevant] intention motivates the person’ to A but as far as I can see, this is equivalent for him to ‘the person tries to A’, or anyway so I will treat it for my purposes.
Since I hold that an agent can try and that be followed by no physical actions whatever, the attribution of time to trying is more complicated than I say here, but that complication is not pertinent to this discussion. See Ruben (2015).
For a contrary view about conditionals with impossible antecedents, see Nolan (1997).
In the literature on the analysis of dispositions, in addition to finks and reverse-cycle fink, there are antidotes (or maskers) and mimickers. Some substance is a poison iff if a person were to ingest it, it would be fatal. But that can’t be correct: there are maskers. If the poison were ingested, and the person given an antidote, the poison wouldn’t be fatal. The antidote masks the effects of the poison. A plate is fragile iff if it were dropped, it would break. But that can’t be right: there are mimickers. A mimicker brings about the effects in lieu of the disposition. Consider a plate made of Styrofoam, that isn’t fragile. But if the Hater of Styrofoam hears the plate whenever dropped, and tears it to shreds as a consequence, then when dropped, it will break in spite of not being fragile. A mimicker is parallel to a fink; in both cases, the conditionals are true in spite of the falsity of the LHS. An antidote is parallel to a reverse-cycle fink. In both cases, the conditional is false in spite of the truth of the LHS.
‘Whereas Martin’s so-called ‘finkish’ cases featured an object gaining (or losing) a disposition when the activation conditions for that disposition obtain, masking and mimicking cases made use of the external factors to interfere with the connections between dispositions and their associated conditionals’ (Cross 2012).
Yaffe understands Enoch’s counterexample differently than Enoch does. ‘A person… might be convinced that he will fail to C should he try, and so not try. And he might be incapable of shedding this belief, and might be incapable of acting unless he tries. And so it might be the case that he lacks the ability to act thanks to the belief. But it might also be true that if he had the ability to act, and so no longer thought that he would inevitably fail, then he would try and go on to succeed’ (2012, 67). But this seems to say that the agent’s belief that he does not have the skill to C causes him to not have the skill to C, rather than conversely.
An example in which something in the actual world is held constant in a subjunctive conditional is provided by Dorr (2008): ‘If it were the case that… [the axioms of abstract objects] and the concrete world were just as it actually is, then it would be the case that S.’ (37).
In Adams and Mele (1992), they say (327): ‘Now plainly, an agent’s acquiring a proximal intention to A can initiate (cause) something without the agent’s having tried or acted. Suppose that just as Dave acquires a proximal intention to rise from his chair, he dies-before any attempt to rise is initiated …there is nothing that he has tried to do.’ These are cases in which the agent has lost the opportunity to A, so they would not provide a counterexample to a proposed conditional analysis of ‘P has the intention to A’, if it has a clause in the antecedent about the presence of the opportunity to A. Death is a loss of opportunity, but memory failure and distraction are not. The opportunity is still there, even though one forgets about it.
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Acknowledgments
With thanks for their comments and criticisms to many philosophers where earlier versions of this paper were read: Haifa University, The Hebrew University Jerusalem, Birkbeck and Kings College London, and especially to David Enoch.
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Ruben, DH. A conditional theory of trying. Philos Stud 173, 271–287 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0490-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0490-5