This purposing is clearly a mental event because the subject has privileged access to it. If my hand does not move, but you infer from my brain-states that I was trying to move it; I can have all your information. But I have further information from my own experience—I know what I was trying to do. The agent knows his purposings better than the outsider.
Among mental states, purposing is a conscious episode. It is something of which the agent is aware as guiding his movements. He does not purpose while he is asleep. I cannot really be setting myself, endeavouring, trying, meaning to do something unless I am aware of that trying. Awareness may, however, vary in degree. An agent may be giving all his attention to some action which he is performing, or he may be doing something else at the same time, with most of his attention on the latter.
Not merely must I be aware of purposings as elements of my conscious life, but I must be aware of them as the purposings they are, if they are to be my purposes. As with his thoughts, the subject's beliefs about his purposes are infallible, for purposing is pursuing a goal, and pursuing a goal involves understanding what goal it is that you are pursuing. I cannot misidentify my purpose as a purpose to go to London rather than as a purpose to go, in the opposite direction, to Edinburgh. For if I thought of myself as endeavouring to go to London, I couldn't really be endeavouring to go to Edinburgh, in the sense that this was the goal which I was pursuing. Certainly, there are purposes, such that the beliefs that he has those purposes are ones which the agent refuses to admit to himself, refuses to admit to consciousness. But he believes that he has the purposes all the same, as he may admit when psychoanalysed. And also, as with his thoughts, and for the same reason, a person may misstate his purposes when he expresses them in a public language. But he has infallible beliefs about what he is up to all the same.66 Likewise,
purposings, like thoughts, are intrinsically
propositional. They are attitudes towards (viz. seekings to bring about) states of affairs under a description. A purposing to bring it about that p is not the same as a purposing to bring it about that q, even if p is logically equivalent to q. And purposings are the purposings they are, not in virtue of their context, but in virtue of their intrinsic content; otherwise the subject with false beliefs about the context of their occurrence could not have infallible knowledge of them.
Purposings as active, are clearly distinguished from sensations and thoughts which are passive conscious episodes. I have already distinguished between purposings and desires. Purposings are obviously distinct from beliefs; they are endeavours to change things, not simply beliefs that things are a certain way. Purposings are a separate kind of mental event. However, purposings do involve beliefs. You cannot purpose to some action without two beliefs. The first belief, which I shall articulate more fully below, is that something you know how to do will make a difference to whether or not you do that action. In other words, you cannot do some action, unless you have some idea how to set about it. I cannot even try to turn into a frog, because I wouldn't know how to begin. The second belief involved in purposing to perform some action is that the agent must believe the action to be in some way a good thing—either because it involves bringing about a good state of affairs, or because the bringing about which it involves is itself good. If you search for food, then you regard the having of food by you as a good thing; if you sing or dance, then you regard the production of the noises or movements as a good thing. And if you purpose to go to see your aged aunt instead of watching the football, that, too, can only be because you regard it as a good thing that you visit your aunt—either because being with her is good in itself, or for some further reason. You couldn't purpose to go to see your aunt if you thought that you had no duty to do so; it would give no one any pleasure, you wouldn't enjoy it, etc., etc.; if you thought that your visiting her would be in no way a good thing. I am not saying that agents always do the action which they believe to be the best available to them; indeed, I shall argue against that in the next chapter. I am simply claiming that an agent can purpose to perform an action only if he believes it to be in some way a good thing to do. These two beliefs are necessary conditions of purposing and so of intentional action, not sufficient conditions.
My first criticism of volition theory was that it made action too active a process. I have, I hope, cured this deficiency by improving the theory and, in the course of doing so, substituting a different technical term which does not carry the misleading implications of ‘volition’. My second criticism of the old volition theory is in a way, I think, deeper. It is that volition theory does not make action an active enough process! This point will come out if we ask how, according to volition theory, do we discover which effects the various purposings have. We discover whether imbibing sugar or imbibing cyanide nourish or poison by noting the effects of such imbibings. If purposings are events like any other events, will we not learn what effects they have by empirical study? An agent will discover the effects of purposing to move his hand and seeing what happens—whether his hand moves or his leg moves or his tongue falls out, or whatever; and then he will have a justified belief about the effects of purposing to move his hand, which he did not have before.
That account of how we acquire beliefs about the effects of our purposings is obviously wrong. And why it is wrong is because it ignores the way in which such technical notions as purposing have been introduced. Purposing to do A is a state of the agent which, when he does A intentionally, brings about the basic result B of his intentional action A, the bringing about of which result will, the agent believes, in the circumstances of its occurrence lead to the occurrence of
A. But it is not any state of the agent which brings about the basic result but that mental state which, had the basic
result not occurred (e.g. because the agent was paralysed or otherwise prevented from moving his limbs), we would call ‘trying’. And trying to do an action simply is initiating whatever causal chain, the agent believes, will make that action more likely to occur than it otherwise would; and since the agent believes that the occurrence of B will bring about the occurrence of A, trying to do A is simply doing whatever, the agent believes, will make B more likely to occur. We cannot describe trying, and so purposing, except in a way which already involves the agent's conception of its causal relations, that is its intrinsic nature. To try, and so to purpose, to move one's hand is not to do something which the agent might subsequently come to believe, made a difference to whether or not his hand moved; it is to act in such a way that, the agent already believes, the hand movement will be more likely to
occur. (Of course other things, such as bodily malfunctioning, may, on occasion, cause the agent's purposings to have unintended effects, or to have no effects at all, and the agent may suspect in advance that this will happen. All that he needs to believe if he is to purpose is that his purposing is more likely to produce the result sought than his failing to do so.) A purposing to move my hand is not to be confused with thinking about moving my hand or saying to myself ‘I will move my hand’; with respect to these there are independent intrinsic descriptions of what is going on which make no reference to their causal influence on hand-moving. But there is no other intrinsic description of trying and so of purposing (or volition) except in these causal terms.
It is only if an agent believes that he can make a difference to whether something happens, that he can purpose to do so. For if he does not believe that he can make any difference, he cannot do what, he believes, will make a difference; there is nothing for him to do. It is for this reason that I cannot try (i.e. purpose) to turn into a frog. For having no belief that anything I do will make my turning into a frog more likely to occur, I have no idea how to try. The only way to achieve any result is to try to bring it about. Someone might suppose otherwise—that there are better ways of getting things done than trying to get them done—as in the saying ‘The way to sink a putt is not to try.’ But that saying is misleading. What it really means is that the way to sink a putt is not to concentrate on the putting alone; it is to hit the ball towards the hole, while thinking and talking of other things at the same time. The ball landing in the hole is a result best achieved by doing other things. The saying is telling us that there is a recipe for sinking a putt; if trying is to be successful, it will have to be conjoined with a belief that getting the ball into the hole is best achieved by doing certain acts described under other basic act-descriptions (e.g. ‘thinking and talking of other things’); the putter will have to abandon the belief that ‘sinking a putt’ is for him a basic act description—it isn't; he can't sink a putt just like that, he can only do it by doing something else as well. It remains the case that there is no other way to sink a putt or to do anything else except to try—but in the case of many actions, you need the right beliefs about which basic actions will achieve your goal; you need the right recipe. But basic actions are those for which there is no recipe. An agent who tries to move his arm (without using other limbs) does
not have any beliefs about how to do it. The only description of his action which he sees as applying to it is as ‘trying to move his arm’, i.e. ‘doing what, he believes, will make his arm more likely to move’. That is the intrinsic nature of the action. Note that purposings may vary in degree. Less technically, one may try, and then try harder, and then try harder still. The agent must regard trying harder as exerting more causal influence.
Now although an agent must believe that his purposings make a difference, an observer need not. I may believe that when you try to move your arm, that makes no difference to whether your arm is going to move; but I cannot believe that of myself. On any given occasion, or perhaps on all occasions, the agent may be mistaken about whether he is making the action causally more likely to occur. He may even think that he is intentionally making his hand move when he is doing no such thing. Bodily processes which do not involve his purposing may bring about the hand motion; but his purposing makes no difference to what happens. In such a case the purposing remains, as I have described, doing whatever the agent believes will make the result causally more likely to occur. The intrinsic description of the purposing involves reference to its ‘causal efficacy’, but only its believed causal efficacy.
But, as we have seen, an agent has to think of his purposing as more than that, as, in fact, his making causally more likely the result of his basic action; and if the agent is correct in his beliefs, that is what it is. When my purposing is successful, the act of purposing to move my arm (intrinsic description) is, in virtue of its causal efficacy, the act of intentionally causing my hand to move (extrinsic description). Since it must seem (epistemically) to the agent that he makes certain things causally more likely to occur, if he is to act at all, he ought, by the principle of credulity described in Chapter 1, to believe that he does, in the absence of counter-evidence. And knowing that others are like himself in their mental life and modes of behaviour, he will realize that he can only think of himself as making a difference to his bodily movements, if he thinks of others as doing so also.67
67 That causation is part of the content of the experience of acting has been very well argued in J. R. Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge University Press, 1973, chs. 3 and 4 . He
argued that in acting we experience ourselves as causing, and in perception we experience ourselves as being caused. (We cannot regard ourselves as seeing something unless we regard our visual experience as being caused by the object seen.) He shows how our knowledge of events causing events in the inanimate world derives from our knowledge of experienced causation, and not the other way round—as is commonly supposed in accounts of causation deriving from Hume.
Other arguments in favour of our purposes affecting our brains, and so our bodily movements (and so not being mere epiphenomena), are as follows. First there is an argument similar to that used in Chapter 2and 4—we couldn't have justified beliefs about our purposes unless our purposes had effects; and we couldn't state our purposes publicly with justification, unless they had brain, and so bodily, effects. Secondly, between purposings that there occur bodily movements of certain kinds and the occurrence of the movements purposed there are very regular correlations—for normal people in normal circumstances invariable correlations—of a very simple kind (a purposing that X occur is followed by the occurrence of X). There is an obvious and natural hypothesis to explain this—viz. that (for a normal person in normal circumstances) purposings that bodily movements X occur cause the occurrence of X. To avoid this by postulating a common cause would be to put forward a very much more complicated hypothesis; and so, by the principle of simplicity, one much less likely to be true. For it would involve postulating that a brain-event which has, as it were, no description of a bodily movement, say the movement of my hand, built into it, can cause both the purposing to move my hand and the movement of the hand. That is indeed logically possible. But the issue is whether in the absence of evidence that the situation is like that, it is reasonable to suppose that it is—when there is such an evident plausible rival hypothesis. We saw earlier that this second reason (of regular correlation) cannot be an agent's sole ground for believing in the efficacy of his own purposes, but it is, nevertheless, a substantial reason for belief in the efficacy of purposes.
Sometimes of course parts of our body get out of control, or even the whole body may temporarily get out of control—as in an epileptic fit—and the agent's purposes are inefficacious. But the regularity under normal conditions is good evidence that under those conditions purposes are efficacious. And that evidence is reinforced by the fact that when conditions become abnormal, you can often make your purposes effective if you try a bit harder. The fact that if you have Parkinson's disease, then ordinary purposing to raise your arm in a straight line is not efficacious but an intense
degree of purposing (i.e. trying very hard) has the intended effect, suggests that that sort of thing is what makes the difference, including when conditions are normal.
I have argued against epiphenomenalism and in favour of the causal efficacy of conscious episodes on bodily events and on other mental events, with respect to sensations, thoughts, and now purposes. A final argument for the causal efficacy of conscious episodes is this. If conscious episodes were not causally efficacious, there would be no evolutionary advantages in an organism developing them. Whereas, if sensation is needed for the acquisition and understanding of beliefs of many kinds, and thought is needed for reaching certain kinds of rational conclusions, which result in action, and if purposing is needed for certain kinds of long-term co-ordinated goal-seeking movements, then there is a good Darwinian explanation of why creatures with sensation, thought, and purpose develop. Otherwise, sensations, thoughts, and purposings would have to be a mere by-product of brain-states which convey no evolutionary advantage. That could be so, but—other things being equal—we ought to suppose that striking features of animals do have some evolutionary function.