Why hold a response-dependence thesis of intentional states?18According to Wright, such a thesis is attractive because it promises to accommodate two aspects of intentional states that seem hard to reconcile. The first is that intentional states share their first person epistemology with phenomenal states such as pains, colour experiences etc. It is characterised by the following features:
- Authority: in normal circumstances, a person’s own judgements are the highest court of appeal with respect to her intentional states; unless there is positive evidence that something has gone wrong (e.g. inconsistency with behaviour or other self-ascriptions of intentional states), if she says she intends/hopes/believes thatΦ, she should be taken to do so.
- Transparency: if a person is in intentional state I, she will normally be in a position to know this.
- Groundlessness: Beliefs about one’s own intentional states are not usually inferred on the basis of other evidence; it does not make sense to ask forreasons
for a subject’s beliefs about her own intentional states.
The second aspect is that intentional states are answerable to certain constraints about future performance. In this, they resemble dispositional characteristics like
18 By intentional states, I mean propositional attitude states – believing, desiring, intending,
courage, modesty, endurance and irritability, and differ from phenomenal states. An ascription of a certain intentional state can be overridden if it conflicts with the subject’s behaviour and other self-ascriptions of intentional states. For example, if someone claims to hope thatΦ, but reacts with horror to indications that Φmight be about to materialise, so much the worse for her claim to hope thatΦ.
It is easy to find a theory of intentional states that explains one of these two sets of features. The first person epistemology would be nicely explained by a Cartesian view, on which the subject has direct, infallible access to her own mental states in virtue of a sort of observational privilege. But such a view fails to do justice to the conditionality on future performance. On the other hand, a dispositional account of intentional states would nicely explain the latter, but it would make a mystery of the first person epistemology of intentional states. The challenge is to find an account that would accommodate both groups of features.
A Euthyphronic account of intentional states seems well suited for this task. Authority is explained by the right to left reading of the biconditional in the relevant provisional equation: Given favourable conditions, if a subject would judge that she is in Φ, she is in Φ. Transparency follows from the left to right reading: Given favourable conditions, if she is inΦ, she would judge this to be so. Groundlessness is also accommodated, as subjects are not in the business of tracking independent facts about their intentional states; there is nothing more to e.g. having an intention than that given suitable conditions, we would judge this to be so. (Relatedly, you need no reasons for your self-ascriptions of intentional states; you are justified in making any judgement about them whenever it seems right to you because of the way the C- conditions work in this domain; more on this below.) The disposition-like features of intentional states, on the other hand, are accommodated by the possibility that conditions might turn out not to be favourable after all. Such a conclusion can be forced by inconsistency with the subject’s behaviour or her other self-ascriptions of intentional states.
The core idea of a Euthyphronist thesis of intentional states is the usual one: best opinions determine the extensions of the concepts, rather than tracking independently constituted facts about the subject matter in question. But the exact shape of the proposal must be slightly different from the general Euthyphronist
paradigm. The suggestion can’t be that judgements about one’s own intentional states made in circumstances that can be checked in advance to be favourable determine extensions case by case. As pointed out by Boghossian (1989), the alleged extension-determining judgements are themselves states of exactly the kind under discussion. These judgements must have a specific content if they are to be able to do any extension-determining at all. But doesn’t this mean, contrary to Euthyphronism, that the extensions of (at least some) concepts of intentional states, and the corresponding facts about intentional states, must be given in advance of these judgements being made?19
Wright’s response to Boghossian’s worry is that ascription of content to intentional states is a holistic matter. Unfortunately, his written comments on this point are very brief. He writes:
My own instinct is that we do better, in the case of intentional states, to look for a holistic mode of dependence: roughly, that the details of a subject’s intentional states are, a priori, determined in such a way as to maximise harmony with her self-conception, as manifest in her own elicitable self- ascriptions (or, at least, to minimise inexplicable discord with it).20
The idea seems to be that the contents of intentional states are not to be determined case by case by the deliverances of best opinions in specific circumstances. Rather, the intentional states of subjects are in principle assessed as a whole, which allows the various states to have a role in determining each other.21 The subject’s self- ascriptions of intentional states should be taken at face value unless something contradicts them, in which case the revision should be chosen that allows her as much rationality as possible.22
19Boghossian (1989), p. 546-47. 20Wright (1992), p. 138-39, n. 47.
21 The Euthyphronist account of intentional states thus has affinities with Davidsonian
interpretativism: someone is in a certain intentional state is that the most charitable overall interpretation of the subject’s mental life entails that she is in that state. Wright’s view differs from Davidson’s in that the first person point of view is given a constitutive role in the account.
22An alternative understanding of the account would have it that C-conditions for judging on a
The same line of thought underlies Wright’s strategy with another problem for Euthyphronism regarding intentional states: with intentional states, there is no prospect for a complete set of substantially specified C-conditions. To capture the class of best judgements about intentional states, we would need to rule out perturbing factors like self-deception. But self-deception functions as a catch-all clause for all the ways in which a subject could be ignorant or mistaken about her own intentional states, and so is something very close to the whatever-it-takes- clauses that the substantiality requirement was meant to rule out.
Wright’s response to this problem is that the no-self-deception condition is positive-presumptive: if there is no evidence to the contrary, we assume that it is fulfilled, whereas it takes evidence to show that it isnotfulfilled. Similarly for other parts of the C-conditions, e.g. that the subject must be paying attention to the relevant states. This means that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we can assume a biconditional connection between intentional states and the person’s own beliefs about them. In effect, the no-self-deception clause and similar conditions can be deleted from the list of C-conditions.
This move fits well with the way discourse about intentional states works: When assessing self-ascriptions of intentional states, we actually do take them at face value as long as nothing counts against them, though we are willing to revise them in the face of countervailing evidence. However, there is a question whether this move makes the C-conditions work in a too flexible way; in effect, it enables us to claim failure of C-conditions every time the biconditional is violated. Is this consistent with the motivation behind the substantiality condition?
Probably the answer is yes. As we shall see in Ch. 7, a too rigid interpretation of the substantiality condition is both unnecessary and too strong for many cases where response-dependence theses seem attractive. The condition is there merely to rule out triviality, and this is something far weaker than requiring a full list of conditions that can be known independently to obtain.
If the move with positive-presumptive C-conditions works, it might also address another challenge to Euthyphronism about intentional states, this time
however. His interest in the first person perspective notwithstanding, he wants to reserve a more important role for interpretation from a third person’s perspective than this suggestion would allow.
regarding the independence condition: It is not possible to specify the C-conditions in a way that is independent of the extensions of concepts of intentional states. For example, it is hard to see how to capture the notion of self-deception without using intentional state concepts in illegitimate ways.23
The move with positive-presumptive C-conditions promises a way out. If each of the problematic C-conditions can be assumed to be met if nothing suggests otherwise, and if this allows us to delete it from the ‘pool of assumptions’ in the C- conditions, then we can presumably get the concept off the ground without making illegitimate assumptions about its extension. When later (logically and temporally) we may have to judge that the conditions were not in fact met, enough of the content of the concepts will already be in place, and so any presuppositions about it will not be illegitimate. Or at least that would be the suggestion.24
Euthyphronist accounts of intentional states deserve further attention, and raise further problems; all I hope to have done in this section is to convey a flavour of the proposal, and the way it differs from the standard Euthyphronist recipe.