There are reasons and reasons

Abstract

Why do people do the things that they do? This is a very general question, and I want here to treat it as such, without unduly narrowing it down. I do, however, want to restrict the question to those things done that are intentional actions, or things done for a reason in the particular sense that Elisabeth Anscombe was searching for in her book Intention.1 People sometimes do things other than what we would consider to be intentional actions. When Talleyrand (the great French diplomat who served in turn the Ancient Régime, the Revolutionary government, Napoleon I, the restored monarchy with Louis XVIII, and Louis-Philippe after the 1830 revolution) finally died in 1838, Metternich famously remarked 'I wonder what he meant by doing that'. But people do not die intentionally, for reasons in the sense required for meaningful intentional action (suicide is something quite different), and that is what makes the remark into a nice compliment to Talleyrand, who was said never to do anything without good reason. Now, following on from Anscombe, and since the work of Donald Davidson, I will characterise intentional action as action done for a primary reason, consisting of a belief and an attitude towards this kind of action (I will from now on call it a desire, in the knowledge that this term is desperately vague; but nothing hangs on it here), and this belief and desire will give the answer why, in the sense we want, people do the things that they do. As Davidson puts it, the primary reason rationalises the action. And it will also causally explain it.2 That intentional action can be explained in this way, by reference to mental states of the individual - beliefs and desires - is now pretty much a philosophical commonplace, and the idea now has claim for a kind of monopoly. In fact, it has claim for two kinds of monopoly. First, it claims a monopoly in the sense that all intentional actions are supposed to be explainable by appeal to the individual's beliefs and desires - by what I will from now on call a belief-desire explanation. This first monopolistic claim has recently been challenged, but I have no quarrel with it so far as it goes;3 in fact, I think it is correct. It is the second claim for monopoly that is my target. This is the claim that belief-desire explanation fully and satisfactorily explains intentional action, or, alternatively, that any other kind of explanation will ultimately resolve into a belief-desire explanation. When it comes to action explanation (and prediction too for that matter, although that will not be my concern here), the beliefdesire story is supposed to be the only game in town. For example, Jerry Fodor uses the terms 'commonsense psychology' and 'commonsense beliefdesire psychology' pretty much interchangeably, and Donald Davidson says that constructing a primary reason (a belief-desire pair) is not only necessary but also sufficient to rationalise an action. More recently, Greg Currie and Ian Ravenscroft place all their emphasis on the idea that our 'everyday understanding of minds' requires a grasp of 'the beliefs and desires of someone -whose behaviour we want to predict or understand', and Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich say that 'the central concepts implicated in mindreading' are 'belief, desire, intention'.4 In challenging this second claim for monopoly, I will try to show that our everyday explanations of intentional action - as part of our so-called folk psychology - are characteristically quite different from this. What will emerge, I hope, is that these everyday kinds of explanations of action, which I will call thicker explanations, are much more revealing, much more far-reaching, and much more varied than belief-desire explanations. Because I am not challenging the first monopolistic claim, I am not denying the availability of belief-desire explanations. What I am denying is their explanatory adequacy; belief-desire explanations are seldom sufficient as explanations. Moreover, in their detail belief-desire explanations are not necessary either, except in special circumstances of the kind I will be discussing. If this is true, then there are significant implications for the philosophical debate concerning the way we go about our everyday explanations of other people's actions. If the belief-desire story was the only game in town, then any explanation of action would have to appeal to these reasons - beliefs and desires as occurrent mental states of the individual - and appeal to these reasons would be sufficient to explain an action. And then the question becomes pressing as to how we 'gain access' to, or come to know, another person's beliefs and desires. Do we gain a grasp of these reasons, these occurrent mental states of the other person, by theorising about them, as what are sometimes called 'unobservables'; or do we simulate or imaginatively project ourselves into the shoes of the other person in order to generate imaginative counterparts of the other's mental states in our own minds, and then assume that the other is thinking as we are? It is now fashionable to call this the 'mindreading' debate, which is the term supposed to bring out the apparent mysteriousness of how we can 'gain access' to what is going on in another's mind.5 But if my claim is true, then this whole debate would seem to have the wrong focus: 'Mindreading', in the sense of 'reading' the goings-on in another's mind, is only a small part of what is necessary for our everyday framework of action explanation, and this is because the detailed goingson in the other person's minds as causes of the action are not relevant to those thicker explanations that I will be discussing. What the current debate seems to have lost track of is something that ought not to be at all controversial, namely the sheer complexity of the aetiology of intentional action, and the consequent diversity of possible causal factors that can be appealed to in any given explanation. Beliefs and desires, as occurrent mental states, are only one causal factor, and appealing to them to explain an action is (except in special circumstances) redundant. © 2007 Springer.