Consider this narrative from Donald Davidson:
"This morning I was awakened by the sound of someone practicing the violin. I dozed a bit, then got up, washed, shaved, dressed, and went downstairs, turning off a light in the hall as I passed. I poured myself some coffee, stumbling on the edge of the dining room rug, and spilled my coffee fumbling for the New
York Times."52
Shaving, dressing, the darkness in the hallway: these are all intentional. Stumbling and spilling are not: they are
failures. And while Davidson does not mention it, he also made some noise walking downstairs, but that was
presumably not his goal, but rather a side effect. Call these various descriptions practical categories. One essential task for any theory of intentional action is to provide an account of these. I presume this much of a starting point: these categories represent various ways the agent's thought can relate to the world. For instance, part of what separates intentional actions from failures is that the latter do not match some aspect of the agent's thought – what you intended to do you didn't do. The difficulty therefore is to spell out what these various relations consist of.
We can begin our account of this suite of relations by considering Davidson's famed argument for
causalism. In effect, Davidson argues that in order to distinguish intended from side effects, we must rely on causal notions. As he puts it,
"...a person can have a reason for an action, and perform the action, and yet this reason not be the reason why he did it."53
To hold otherwise blurs the distinction between those things we intend, and those we desire but merely foresee. One might, for instance, make a hiring decision based purely on citation rates, know that this will lead to the hiring of one's close friend, and yet nevertheless intend to hire on merit rather than friendship. The thought about citation rates, unlike the thought about friendship, explains the hiring. Davidson therefore proposes that our thoughts about
52
Davidson 1971 p. 43. 53
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intended effects are causally efficacious in ways that our thoughts about potential side effects are not. In retrospect, this seems hasty: Davidson's argument does not rule out forms of non-causal dependence, which might equally do the job of sorting out intended from side effects. Thus, I reinterpret Davidson's conclusion: intended effects depend
on our motivating reasons, in ways that they do not depend on our thoughts about side effects. And this suggests a
general scheme: practical categories represent various ways the world can depend on the agent's thought.
Unfortunately, both causal and non-causal dependence introduce a new problem: the notorious "deviant" or "wayward" causal chain, exemplified in this example of Davidson's:
"A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his hold, and yet it might be the case that he never chose to loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally."54
The difficulty here is that the climber's reasons for murder are causally efficacious at bringing about the intended death, but not "in the right way." While Davidson himself eventually despaired of a non-trivial account of deviance, this is the conclusion of last resort.55
The task of this chapter is therefore to define four practical categories: intended, side effect, failure, and deviant.
If there is an account to be had, we would like to have it.
56
54
Davidson 1973 p. 79. The example here is formulated in terms of causal dependence, but a theory of non-causal dependence may face the same problems, e.g. as Sarah Paul has argued (2010).
But §2.2 addresses only an artificially restricted part of the topic. I consider only causal dependence, rather than dependence generally. And I consider only the problem of distinguishing deviant causation from intentional action, rather than the practical categories generally. Drawing on theories of causal understanding from the philosophy of science, I argue that agents understand how their thoughts connect to the world. When that understanding is correct, then thought and world meet non-deviantly. In §2.3, I respond to some objections to this proposal. In §2.4, I drop the earlier restrictions, and show how to use these ideas to define the practical categories generally. To do so, I rely on a surprising conclusion of the foregoing. Practical thought must be de se or self- locating in a particularly strong sense (discussed in Chapter One §1.3): the practical thought of agents locates itself in the causal structure of the world.
55
Davidson 1978 p. 87. 56
As it turns out, these categories are grammatically quite awkward. On my view, this is an artifact of the fact that they apply to a wide range of objects: processes, events, states, anything that may depend on an agent's practical reasoning. But one might well wonder whether this grammatical awkwardness is a sign of underlying logical diversity - i.e. that by defining these categories so broadly I am improperly lumping together logically disparate concepts which would be better kept separate. In this as in so many other things, I suggest that the proof is in the pudding: if I can give a unified account of these categories which applies to these various objects, then this is reason to conclude that the awkward grammar is just that: awkward grammar, nothing more.
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