Intentional Action and Knowledge of What you are Doing

1. Introduction.

After having been for quite some time on the defensive on behalf of non-intentionalism, I will now take up a more offensive approach. For the question has not yet been asked: what exactly is it that the non-intentionalist finds objectionable with intentionalism, such that he/she is motivated to seek an alternative account? The answer, in short, is that the idea of intentionally deceiving oneself has been usually deemed worth avoiding because it has certain paradoxical consequences, and because it is regarded as something it would be impossible to realize (in ordinary circumstances), which would preclude it from being of any explanatory use with respect to the kinds of cases we are examining. Next we will examine why exactly one might think of intentional self-deception as paradoxical and impossible to realize in ordinary circumstances. The reason, it will emerge, is based on the thesis that doing something intentionally entails doing it knowingly. I call this the knowledge condition on intentional action.

Regarding this knowledge condition, we should ask, (1) is this a condition that we should accept?, and (2) if this should be accepted, will it rule out an intentionalist interpretation of common Basic Scenario cases? My conclusion will be in the affirmative on both counts. I will argue that doing something intentionally entails doing it knowingly, and that if we then accept the knowledge condition as a general constraint that an intentionalist theory of self-deception must respect, then for a number of (though not all) prospective strategies of intentional self-deception, this constraint would mean that one could not possibly deceive oneself intentionally by such means. And in particular, for the kinds of actions seen to be operative in the Basic Scenario cases, this constraint would prove fatal for the prospects of an intentionalist interpretation of those actions. Therefore, by a process of

elimination, this will amount to a recommendation for the non-intentionalist interpretation of these intentional actions. This I will attempt to show in this chapter.

Let me just state now though that this will not be the end of the matter. For as I will discuss in chapter 6, there is one particular prospective strategy of intentional self-deception which may be immune to these objections. That is, there may be one strategy of intentional self-deception which could be carried out knowingly and yet successfully. However, this particular strategy seems to be not particularly relevant to the question of how to interpret common Basic Scenario cases, since psychologists have found no evidence that it is operative in such cases. Nevertheless, I will show that it is open to the intentionalist to argue that it’s possible that this strategy is undertaken in cases which are similar to garden-variety Basic Scenario cases, but which have escaped the scrutiny of experimental psychologists for various reasons. Thus the intentionalist can try to carve out an area for herself for which her intentionalist theory has application. The strategy I have in mind here I call the attentional strategy, which involves shifting attention between belief-relevant considerations. And as I will argue, what makes it crucially different from other potential strategies of self-deception, such that it might overcome the knowledge condition objection, it that it is a knowledge undermining strategy. That is, it is specifically geared towards suppressing any knowledge one may have which is standing in the way of one having the desired belief. Discussion of it will be reserved for the following chapter, where that strategy will be criticized on empirical grounds, and hence on grounds that are different from that of demonstrating any paradoxes associated with it.

2. Intentional Action and Awareness of What One is Doing.

Deflationist skepticism over the viability of intentionalist accounts has its source in the following point mentioned by Mele:

It is often held that doing something intentionally entails doing it knowingly. If that is so, and if deceiving is by definition an intentional activity, then one who deceives oneself does so knowingly. But knowingly deceiving oneself into believing that p

would require knowing that what one is getting oneself to believe is false. How can that knowledge fail to undermine the very project of deceiving oneself? It is hard to imagine how one person can deceive another into believing that p if the latter person knows exactly what the former is up to. And it is difficult to see how the trick can be any easier when the intending deceiver and the intended victim are the same person (1997a: 92).

Mele dubs this problem associated with the idea of intentionally deceiving oneself, the

dynamic paradox. Fundamental to this paradox is the presupposition that if one Ved

intentionally, one necessarily must have known or been aware that one was doing that, namely, Ving.37 In other words, the description of the action under which it was done intentionally is a description that you must have known was applicable to the action when you did it. This seems to suggest that ‘unconsciously yet intentionallyVing’ is contradictory.

Philosophers have frequently thought that there’s a conceptual connection between the notion of intentional action and knowledge/awareness of what you’re doing (see

37 _{Actually, whether Mele is really committed to this is unclear, since he states elsewhere that ‘hidden}

intentions’ are possible (1997: 100). However, Mele does think that there is something paradoxical about the idea of intentionally deceiving yourself, and it’s hard to see what else could be generating this paradox if not this presupposition. I am in agreement with Bermúdez on the issue of this alleged entailment, who says that ‘nothing less than this will generate the dynamic paradox’ (1997: 108).

Anscombe 1957: 11 & 87. Bratman 1984: 387. Donnellan 1963: 406. Gorr and Horgan 1982. Gustafson 1975: 89. Hamlyn 1971: 46. Hampshire 1970: 145. Moran 2001: 125. Mele and Moser 1994: 41-42. Miller 1980: 334). Some lexicographers apparently assume so too. For instance, the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition, defines ‘deliberate’, which is often used interchangeably with ‘intentional’ in the self-deception literature, as ‘done with or marked by full consciousness of the nature and effects; intentional’. I assume the relevant considerations that might support such claims would be as follows. Take any occasion when you do something without knowing or being aware that you are doing it. Say, for instance, that you are making soup, and you unwittingly add some sugar (you think that it’s salt). Or imagine that you travel to an exotic country with very different customs and you meet one of the locals. You do something that would not attract any notice in your country but which is taken to be insulting in this culture, causing offence to the local, though you weren’t aware that this action is considered offensive. Now it seems clear that in these cases we say that we added the sugar or offended the local neither intentionally nor deliberately, and in defending this claim, we naturally advert to the fact that we weren’t aware that that was what we were doing, which we take to be sufficient to show that we couldn’t have done these things intentionally. Saying that would have presupposed awareness that the substance was sugar, or that the action could be construed as an insult. A philosopher could then argue that by parity with such cases, if someone deceived herself intentionally, she must have known that she was doing that.

This is not to imply that if an agent does something unintentionally, there are not some descriptions of the action under which it was intentional and under which the agent was aware of herself doing it. Consider the following descriptions of an action that I may perform at an auction: 1) I raise my finger, 2) I bid for the painting, 3) I bid for the forgery. Let’s say, however, that I didn’t know that the painting was a forgery, though I knew that I was raising

my finger and bidding for a painting. In that case, the claim is that I did not, and indeedcould nothaveintentionallybid for the forgery, though I knew that I was bidding for a painting and bid for it intentionally.

It is also worth noting that, at least if the surveys of Malle and Knobe (1997: 112-114) are anything to go by, the judgments of philosophers in these cases are in accord with the ‘intuitions’, or linguistic usage, of ordinary people too. From the use of questionnaires describing certain actions given to 225 undergraduate students, Malle and Knobe found that they were generally unwilling to attribute intentionality to the actions if the actors were described as being unaware that they were doing them.38 They conclude that to the theorist ‘who believes in unconsciously performed intentional actions (dispelling the awareness component), the results must be surprising, if not damaging’ (1997: 114).

3. Objections.

As one might expect, objections to this thesis have been raised, and purported counterexamples brought forward. This thesis, which is crucial to the critique of intentionalism that follows, will now be defended against them. Some of these objections will force qualifications in our position, but I will argue that they do not amount to a refutation of the knowledge condition thesis.

Objection 1) Firstly, consider a case where the success of our intentional enterprise is not a sure thing (Davidson 2001/1978: 91-92. Ross 1982: 264). Imagine NASA launching a rocket programmed to destroy an asteroid hurtling towards Earth. Imagine also that they have serious doubts that the mission will succeed though the exigency demands they try, and

38_{They also foundskillto be an important component of the concept of intention, in that subject’s need to have}

the skill to pull off an action in order to be able to do that action intentionally, though this point is beyond our concern here.

imagine that they do succeed. Because of these doubts, the argument goes, we may not be able to describe them as having known that they would destroy the asteroid (if such uncertainty is incompatible with knowledge), yet it seems correct to say that they intentionally destroyed the asteroid. This is an important exception, yet we would be overreacting to it if we were to deny, on its basis, any necessary link between intentionally action and awareness of what you’re doing, since surely in all cases like this, the agents would have to be aware that they were at leasttryingto do what they succeeded in doing. It’s hard to imagine how NASA, for instance, could have intentionally destroyed the asteroid without having known that that’s what they were trying to do. These kinds of case, then, certainly give us cause to modify our statement of the knowledge condition:

Knowledge condition: If oneVs intentionally, one must know or be aware that one is

Ving, or at least that one is trying to V (in cases where one doesn’t know if one’s attempt atVing will be successful).

But this qualification is surely no admission that there can be unconscious intentional action in the sense that would be congenial to intentionalism.

Objection 2): Ross considers a purposive action ‘done by rote’ and ‘mechanically’, like shifting into third gear during the course of driving, and says, ‘[m]y intuition is that such an act is intentional even though one does not at the time [know]…that one has performed it’ (1982: 263) and others too have expressed similar views (e.g. Martin 1997. Fingarette 1998). I would imagine that the reason why Ross assumes that in such cases the subject didn’t know at the time that he was doing this action is because he’s imagining that the subject was not aware of himself doing the action, his attention being engrossed in other things. However, whether people really are unqualifiedly unaware of what they are doing in such cases is

debatable. For awareness, it seems, need not be an all or nothing affair, but may come in degrees, and it seems that such cases would not untypically involve partial or peripheral awareness of what one is doing (that is, it seems as wrong to say, unreservedly, that subjects arecompletely unawareandobliviousto what they are doing in such cases as it is to say they are fully aware of what they are doing). Granted, in light of such peripheral awareness we would be as reluctant to say, unqualifiedly, that the subject knew she was shifting into third gear as we would be to say that she didn’t know this, but this reluctance is proportional with, and explains, our hesitation on the question of whether to classify this as an intentional or unintentional action. It is an exemplar of neither. In other words, the fact that there is typically partial awareness of what one is doing in such cases explains the (reserved) inclination, where it may exist, to want to say the action was intentional, so this case does not clearly demonstrate a disconnection between intentional action and knowledge of what you are doing.

Now it might be thought that these kinds of actions would be a good model for understanding the intentionally deceptive act supposedly involved in self-deception. That is, perhaps the self-deceiver’s actions are intentional in an attenuated sense, and they are hazily aware of what they are doing, and because of this hazy awareness, they are able to pull it off successfully. But this does not seem plausible because it is difficult to understand how the self-deceiver would be hazily aware of her self-deceptive actions. The reason for this is that the explanation for why we have only peripheral awareness of what we are doing in the uncontroversial cases doesn’t seem applicable in this case. In the driving case, for instance, we typically fail to be fully aware of our gear shifting because we are so used to doing it that we need not think about it, and because our minds are attracted towards things that are of more interest or significance for us, such as thoughts of this and that, or a conversation with a passenger. However, our deliberate act of self-deception is not like this. As the typical cases

are described, in the issue surrounding our deceiving ourselves is thesignificant issue for us in that moment; it is laden with affective significance (this point is made by Poellner (2004: 57-60) who uses it to criticize Sartre’s view that an intentional act of self-deception can be carried out ‘pre-reflectively’). And furthermore, we can’t say that, like shifting gears, it is something we could do unconsciously because we are ‘so used to doing it we need not think about it’. For then we could ask about that time when you started to learn how to deceive yourself: ‘how did you manage to do it with this casual, semi-awarenessthen?’, and now the answer isn’t available that you were so used to doing it you didn’t have to think about it. There is no problem, of course, with the idea of the driver having to pay attention to his driving before he learns how to do it automatically, but there is with the idea of the intentional self-deceiver having to pay attention to his deceptive activity before learning how to do it automatically.

Perhaps this point is unfair because, as the intentionalist taking this line may argue, self-deception is not a special skill like driving which one needs to pay close attention to initially in order to become adept at it. This may be so, but it seems that if the intentionalist wants to insist that the self-deceiver is not fully aware of his actions under the description of ‘deceiving myself’, he still owes us an explanation for why this is. Such an explanation is available in the shifting-into-third-gear case, but one would have to make good on the promise for an equivalent kind of explanation to convince us of this partial awareness thesis, especially considering how implausible the idea seems in light of the affective significance associated with the self-deceptive project for the self-deceiver.

Objection 3) Another philosopher who challenges the idea of the knowledge condition is J.L. Bermúdez, who says that ‘it seems false that one cannot do something intentionally without doing it knowingly’ (2000: 314). Bermúdez is not here denying that an action would

have to be initiatedby the person knowing the intention with which he is doing it. Rather he says that:

…one can lose touch with an intention while one is in the process of implementing it, particularly when that implementation is a long drawn out process. The fact that an action is precipitated by a conscious intention does not entail that while carrying out the action one remains constantly conscious of the intention that gave rise to it. By the same token, the fact that one is not conscious of the intention while carrying out the action does not undermine the action’s status as intentional (2000: 314).

This criticism foists on the advocate of the knowledge condition an unnecessarily strong claim, however. It is not a requirement of this thesis that the person ‘remains constantly conscious’ of the intention with which he is doing what he’s doing, since it is not implied by the concept of knowledge that he needs to be. A wage-earner may go off to work with the intention of earning a wage, and sure enough, he may not be thinking about that goal then or throughout the day, yet he still knows his intention in doing what he is doing in the sense that if you were to ask him what his intentions are in doing it, he would be able to say that it is to earn a wage. For him to know his intention in what he is doing he needn’t be constantly thinking of it; he just should not have forgotten it.

Let it be clear that this thesis need not imply that there cannot be unconscious intentions. It is a thesis specifically about intentional actions. One can have an intention and not act on it, and we need not insist here that such intentions cannot be unconscious. If, for example, an intention which I have forgotten (especially due to repression, if there is such a