In many cases, it seems that I do a thing intentionally, but I do not believe that I am in fact going to do it. Call these Lacking Belief cases. This was touched on in the case of lucky action, but the problem runs deeper than just in such instances. Let us begin with those accounts such as those put forward by Velleman and Setiya, where intention is taken as reducing to a certain type of belief. An important criticism of this reductionist project, famously raised by Davidson (2001: 92), runs as follow: in order to show that an agent could have an intention to A, or intentionally A, without an intention-unique belief22 that she would A, Davidson asks us to imagine a man
(intentionally) writing his will with the intention of ensuring his family’s well-being. However, due to his current situation of financial distress, he does not believe that he will actually do so. Making the same point, Davidson asks us to imagine a man making copies with carbon paper. The man has the intention to make ten copies, but does not believe that he will succeed in doing so. However, if he was to produce ten copies we would consider all of them to have been made intentionally. If the belief that you will A is not necessary for intentionally A’ing, then it seems the reductionist project is in some danger.
We have already encountered a typical cognitivist’s response to case such as these when we looked at Setiya’s response to lucky action cases in Section 3.3. Indeed, Davidson’s copy-maker is in many ways analogous to the case where Brandon the basketball player takes the shot without believing that he will succeed. To recall, on his initial account an action is intentional if the agent believes that she is doing it, or is more confident of this than she would otherwise be, or is doing this action by doing some other action that she does believe she is doing. When applied to the case of the copy-maker, Setiya’s account would deliver the intuitively plausible verdict that the agent did intentionally make ten copies. However, despite providing the correct result in the case of the copy-maker, this approach provides implausible results when applied to cases where the chances of the agent succeeding in an action are very
slight. This was illustrated by the case of Brandon, where his chances of success were a million-to-one.
22Intention-unique belief is a theoretical placeholder for whatever type of belief a given account of
As we saw, Setiya hopes to avoid this possibility by moving away from talk of an agent’s beliefs about what they are doing, to talk of an agent’s knowledge-how. He then holds that a given action, A, should count as intentional when the agent responsible for it knows how to A, or does A by doing something else that she does know how to do. Setiya takes knowledge-how to be best understood in terms of the agent’s dispositions. Without re-treading the same path discussed in the foregoing section, this move allows him to keep the intuitive answer to the copy-maker and will- writer cases, and provides a better – though still not wholly satisfactory – answer to the very low success chance cases (such as Brandon’s). I take this to be the most compelling account of intentional action currently on the market, and it would be further improved by a better account of what it means to “know how to X” than the (admittedly provisional) dispositional story that Setiya provides. However, I do not pursue such an account here.
This criticism generalises beyond cognitivist accounts to those like Heuer’s, as though intention, or intentional activity, is not reduced to belief in these accounts, it remains the case that the agent must have a self-referential belief that she is A’ing in virtue of which she controls her activity in order for the activity to qualify as intentional. Heuer recognises the worry revealed by Lacking Belief cases, and responds by sketching a parallel case to the carbon paper copier, one where the agent seeks to make only seven copies. In this case, she points out, if the agent was to make ten copies we would not think that the additional three were made unintentionally. Yet the only difference between the two cases lies in the respective agents’ mental states – in their intentions and beliefs. Indeed, she claims that: “[i]n the original casehe must believe that he is pressing so very hard on the page that it isat least possible for him to make ten copies; in the revised case, hemust believe that he is pressing hard enough to make seven copies” (2014: 300).
However, this response is inadequate. There is a difference between believing that you are A’ing and believing that you are possibly A’ing. According to her account, in order for an action A to be intentional it must follow in virtue of a belief that the agent is A’ing. But in this case if the belief the agent has is that he is “possibly A’ing”, then we should describe the intentional action as “the agent is intentionally possibly making 10 copies.” This seems like a very strange thing to say. Rather we would be
inclined to say that the agent has the belief that he will try to A, and that he is intentionally trying to make 10 copies. However, this route is not open to Heuer given that she wishes to claim “kinship” (2014: 299) between her way of understanding intentional action and that of those who follow Anscombe in taking intentional action to involve a kind of non-inferential knowledge of what the agent is doing, she is committed to the idea that “[w]hen someone is acting intentionally, there must be something he is doing intentionally, not merely tryingto do, in the belief that he is doing it [my emphasis]” (2014: 299). She could forsake this kinship, and I think she would be well-advised to do so, in which case she could endorse the solution of taking the relevant self-referential belief to be a belief to try. I will develop this insight in my own account of the role of belief in intentional action in Chapter 2: Section 1.3.
Concluding remarks
In this chapter I have examined the features that we can expect to find in control accounts of intentional action: that they must reflect such action’s responsiveness to reasons as well as account for the epistemic conditions and requirements on intention and intentional action. Having provided this exposition, I then introduced the three broad approaches to understanding intentional action: reason-backed, intention- backed, and knowledge-backed accounts. With the descriptive component of the chapter complete, I then tested the three types of accounts with a number of cases of intentional actions at the fringes – cases where it is difficult to determine whether or not positive status is indeed justified. It was shown that none of the three were able to provide wholly plausible answers in all cases, though knowledge-backed accounts did fare best.
This done, I then presented targeted criticisms aimed at each approach in turn. For reason-backed accounts I argued that they struggle to provide a reasonable answer to cases of intentional akrasia without committing themselves to the view that it is impossible for an agent to act against the balance of all their reasons (be they epistemically transparent to the agent or not). Turning to intention-backed accounts, I showed how they struggle to explain the problem of mutually exclusive intentions without recourse to the introduction of theoretically undesirable notions such as
settled objectives. Finally, I discussed Lacking Belief cases, and some possible responses to them from knowledge-backed accounts. It was found that though conventional accounts of this sort struggle to accommodate them, there remains a strong case to be made for a knowledge-backed account that posits knowledge-how as the condition on intentional action. Though the knowledge-how account discussed, that of Setiya, still had a shortcoming in dealing with cases of actions with a very high likelihood of failure (such as lottery cases, or Brandon’s case) I take it to be the most convincing account of intentional action considered here. It captures the most of the relevant phenomena, while still maintaining a strong theoretical consistency. For this reason, I take knowledge-how knowledge-backed accounts to be the most serious competitor to my own account.
In the next chapter I introduce and develop this account, which I believe can both make sense of the different fringes cases presented, avoid the various targeted criticisms applicable to the three approaches I have discussed, and prove more convincing than my chief competitor.