Alfred Mele

Alfred Mele (Florida State University), "Practical Mistakes and Intentional Actions," with commentary by Jing Zhu (Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of the Sciences) & Andrei Buckareff (Franklin and Marshall). The paper, commentary, and reply can be found here.

Comments

[Malachai M. Nilsai]

I am largely sympathetic to Mr. Mele's aims, but I am not sure whether or not I difer with him in terms of analysis.

Because of the issues that Mr. Mele presents, having to do with the fallibility of the human mind, it seems obvious that not

all goals are always at the forefront of the mind, so we seem forced to claim that there are both conscious and subconscious

intentions (which may just be a rough analogue to "occurrent" and "standing" intentions mentioned on p.15). There is also a distinction between intentions which are habits (general intentions), and those which are the product of creative striving (creative intentions). Of course, the proximal-distal axis is also salient, as Mele rightly notes.

If the above taxonomy is a happy one, then it becomes evident that in both stories, at least one intentional action has been

fulfilled. There are two goals in the stories presented: going home (intention`) and going to the store (intention``). In the

first story, Al is presented with intention`, and he carries it out successfully. In the second, intent` is a subconscious

habit, which succeeds; though intent`` is an instance of creative striving, and it fails.

We might well have problems with the idea of whether or not it is possible to have a subconscious intent (or, in Mele's phrasing, a "standing" intent). Still, it seems that much of the answer to the question, "Did Al have an intent in Story 2?" must be found in an examination of the issue.

There are cases where a reasonable person may fail to fulfill one of their intents because they have succeeded in fulfilling

another one, as Mr. Mele's stories indicate. Let's assume that no reasonable person can ever have contradictory goals before

their conscious mind, since the consciousness would automatically attempt to either reconcile the two or eliminate one, or

else suffer the pains associated with dissonance. Given that, the only condition where a reasonable person may fail to

fulfill one intent due to a success in another one is if we were to allow an intention to be subconscious as well as

conscious (at least in some respect or other).

Some might wonder whether or not a habit is an intent. Arguments 1 and 2 both seem to labor under the idea that it is not

(or, perhaps, that it cannot be): else, they would have to concede that there is an intentional action which was fulfilled.

I'd like to suggest that this may be a mistake: there may be some cases where a habit is an intentionally carried out, and

Al's case may be one of them, depending on a few provisos.

In order to make sense of this idea, there are at least two other comments that should be made in an analysis of intentions.
A. They may be divided between those which have a determinate goal, and those which have an indeterminate one (as in the

division between standing orders and direct orders);
B. Every intention has an end-goal, a means, and a desire; and moreover, the means to the fulfillment of the end-goal is

itself a goal. Let's say that I have decided that I wish to mow the lawn in order to annoy the neighbors (to use an example

from Quinn with respect to the work of Elizabeth Anscombe). In this case, both the mowing of the lawn and the annoyance of

the neighbors are goals, though one is a means to the other. In turn, the mowing may be examined as an end-goal, with

"pushing the mower" etc. as means, until one reaches the point where the the agent is no longer conscious of what they are

doing: in other words, until we hit the hard floor occupied by agency. Contrary to the hopes presented in paragraph 3, at

least some portion of the intent must be available to the conscious mind in order to be an intent.

If we combine the insights yeilded by (A) and (B), we arrive at a third insight: that only the means by which an intention is

fulfilled need be accessible to the conscious mind in order for that mental event to be called an "intention"; the ultimate

end-goal may be indeterminate, and thus, either inaccessible or not accessed. Habits may fall under this category. Long story short, it depends on whether or not Al was conscious of the fact that he was turning on Home St. that we may say his habit was intentional. If we consider him to have been dazed, or hypnotized by the road, or whatever, then he had no intention; otherwise, he did.

With only the conscious means in front of his mind, Al's actions can only be described in what he is aware he is doing. Those, and only those descriptions are appropriate. It is inappropriate to say that he intends to "turn away from the store", even though he really is doing that, simply because his view of the world at the moment with respect to his goals is limited to "turning down Home street", or perhaps even "turning the wheel in a leftward direction". This seems to overlap with Mr. Mele's conclusion on p.13, as well as the general conclusions of his paper.

Or so it seems to me, on the face of things. I'd like to hear Mr. Mele's thoughts.

[Whit Blauvelt]

The paper makes sense, but toward what end? In some areas, precise delineation and parsing is essential, surely; but in what context(s) does it matter how intentions are enumerated, or counted in or out? I'm not making the "How many angels on the head of a pin?" challenge, since I take intentions - but not angels - as entirely a fact.

But imagine a newly discovered biological curiousity, a "fog monster." This creature is entirely real in all pertinent biological dimensions, but can only exist in a fog. It needs fog like a fish needs water; and it's demise is more instantaneous once removed from its environmental niche. To further complicate things, fog monsters can interpenetrate, and can only be counted by plucking them from the fog - where, as soon as you've plucked one (or was that several, or one with interpenetrating portions of others?) it (they?) almost instantly is gone.

Now, suppose that fog banks with fog monsters behave distinctly from fog banks without any - like most species, they greatly transform their environment in its behavior and what else it can support. A fog bank with fog mosters is as different from one without as a live person is from a corpse.

After a great deal of quick study of plucked monsters in the moment before they decompose, it's determined that rather than being human-shaped, they are more like trees, with deep, branching roots (sometimes even shared roots like aspens) and broad sprays of branches (often intertwined with neighbors' branches). After reaching the practical limits of what could be learned by plucking them, a promising new technology is invented. It now is possible to take a sort of planar cross section of the fog-monster "forest." Unfortunately, though, it is limited to one image at a time, and unlike trees the monsters are quite actively shifting about.

So do you count each of the cross-sectioned branches (or are some trunks? or are some roots?) as a single monster? Probably not.

There's a tendency to describe intentions as if they individuate according to (imagined) speech acts. But what if speech acts and intentions aren't even on the same scale, let alone in one-to-one correspondence? What if a fog bank moves in some direction because of its fog monsters, but the accurate attribution would be to a wholistic interaction among all the monsters and their niche, rather than saying, "That was monster Bob who made that move"? What if it normally takes multiple branches, from multiple monsters, in turn with multiple intertwined roots, to produce any particular monster-attributable action at all?

What if intentional actions don't even correlate one-to-one with intentions? What if anything less than over determination doesn't count as intentional determination at all? What if identification of an intentional act with the sort of strand a simple speech act might name (e.g., "I'll go to the store for a six pack and chips on the way home") is only metonymy at best?

[Malachai M. Nilsai]

Whit: I don't know what Mele would say regarding the import of the subject. But intentions and underlying agency are baseline considerations in studies of accountability; so that's at least one application. Another application of the study of intention is in social sciences and social philosophy, both of which sorely need analytic treatment and development. Another is in the philosophy of language, especially in the field of Pragmatics (you mention speech acts, so there you go).

The fog monster example, it seems to me, raises the question of whether or not there is such a thing as collective agency. By design (and due to imposed epistemic limits), you seem to suggest that fog monsters must be analyzed as a collective agent. That's fine, but I'm not sure it raises any troubles for Mele's account, since his concern had less to do with individuation and more to do with covert and overt intentions. I think the apparatus which I used to reply to Mele has the power to explain collective agency, and thus your concerns; but I don't want to dominate proceedings.

In any case, the treatment of intentions as if they were implicit speech-acts is not troubling to an analysis of collective intentions, it seems to me. Continuing the metaphor, it may be as untroublesome as the comparison of a single person's song to that of a choir.

[Al Mele]

Yentz, the first paragraph of your reply to Whit certainly saved me some time. My conference paper explores a little piece of a much larger puzzle. For a more systematic discussion of the nature of intentions and their functional roles, see chs. 7-13 of my *Springs of Action* (Oxford UP, 1992).

By the way, I'm now working on some issues about intentions that crop up in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Whit, here's something from the *Annual Review of Neuroscience* (2002):

We describe a potential medical application that utilizes the finding that the PPC [posterior parietal cortex] encodes movement intentions. The intention-related activity in the PPC can, in principle, be used to operate a neural prosthesis for paralyzed patients. Such a neural prosthesis would consist of recording the activity of PPC neurons, interpreting the movement intentions of the subject with computer algorithms, and using these predictions of the subject’s intentions to operate external devices such as a robot limb or a computer. (Andersen and Buneo 2002, p. 190)

The idea of a cortical prosthetic is to record . . . intentions to move, interpret the intentions using real-time decode algorithms running on computers, and then convert these decoded intentions to control signals that can operate external devices [including] stimulators imbedded in the patient’s muscles that would allow the patient to move his/her own body, a robot limb, or a computer interface for communication. (p. 213)

How much like fog monsters are the things that these scientists are calling intentions?

[Malachai M. Nilsai]

Al,

Presumably, the fog monsters would have some more foggy and monstery physiological analogue to the human PPC. But, if I'm reading Whit correctly, I think he was concerned with collective agency, especially with respect to the troubles of being able to differentiate between individual agents in an analysis of a collective.

[Al Mele]

Yentz, I took Whit's point to be about intention-individuation, not about collective agency. But we can ask him.

[Malachai M. Nilsai]

Al, the two subjects are intimately related. "Collective agency" is, after all, a phrase used in many cases (including this one) to talk about a crowd of people which we want to attribute with a collective intention, because we're not feeling very comfortable in attributing the end-goal to all the particular intentions of particular individuals.