Abstract
The hypothesis of the mental state-causation of behavior (the MSC hypothesis) asserts that the behaviors we classify as actions are caused by certain mental states. A principal reason often given for trying to secure the truth of the MSC hypothesis is that doing so is allegedly required to vindicate our belief in our own agency. I argue that the project of vindicating agency needs to be seriously reconceived, as does the relation between this project and the MSC hypothesis. Vindication requires addressing what I call the agent-exclusion problem: the prima facie incompatibility between the intentional content of agentive experience and certain metaphysical hypotheses often espoused in philosophy–metaphysical hypotheses like physical causal closure, determinism, and the MSC hypothesis itself. I describe several radically different approaches to the vindication project, one of which would repudiate the MSC hypothesis and embrace metaphysical libertarianism about freedom and determinism. I sketch the position I myself favor–a specific version of the generic approach asserting that the intentional content of agentive experience is compatible with the MSC hypothesis (and with physical causal closure, and with determinism). I describe how my favored approach can plausibly explain the temptation to embrace incompatibilism concerning the agent-exclusion problem.
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Notes
Also important is the third-person phenomenology of agency, the “something it is like” to experience others as agents who are acting for reasons (cf. Horgan and Tienson 2005). Addressing the phenomenology of agency is part of a larger joint project with Graham and Tienson, arguing that the most fundamental kind of mental intentionality, which we call phenomenal intentionality, is phenomenally constituted, is narrow, and comprises not only sensory-perceptual experience but also cognitive states like occurrent thoughts, conative states like occurrent wishes, and agentive experience. See Horgan and Tienson (2002), Horgan et al. (2004, 2007, in press).
Here and throughout I speak of ‘state-causation’ rather than ‘event-causation’. More below on my reasons for this choice of terminology. States can be short-lived, and often when they are they also fall naturally under the rubric ‘event.’
For discussion of a range of psychopathological disorders involving similar sorts of dissociative experience, see Stephens and Graham (2000).
The language of causation seems apt here too: you experience your behavior as caused by you yourself, rather than experiencing it as caused by states of yourself. Metaphysical libertarians about human freedom sometimes speak of “agent causation” (or “immanent causation”), and such terminology seems phenomenologically apt regardless of what one thinks about the intelligibility and credibility of metaphysical libertarianism. Chisholm (1964) famously argued that immanent causation (as he called it) is a distinct species of causation from event causation (or “transeunt” causation, as he called it). But he later changed his mind (Chisholm 1995), arguing instead that agent-causal “undertakings” (as he called them) are actually a species of event-causation themselves—albeit a very different species from ordinary, nomically governed, event causation. Phenomenologically speaking, there is indeed something episodic—something temporally located, and thus “event-ish”—about experiences of self-as-source. Thus, the expression ‘state causation’ works better than ‘event causation’ as a way of expressing the way behaviors are not presented to oneself in agentive experience. Although agentive experience is indeed “event-ish” in the sense that one experiences oneself as undertaking to perform actions at specific moments in time, one’s behavior is not experienced as caused by states of oneself.
The points made in this and the next paragraph, about different ways the phenomenology of purpose can work, are closely connected to the typology of different kinds of phenomenology of doing in Horgan and Tienson (2005).
With respect to successively more fine-grained details of action, specific purposes tend to be progressively less explicit phenomenologically, and progressively less accessible to consciousness—even for actions that result from conscious deliberation. For instance, when you consciously and deliberately decide to get yourself a beer by walking to the fridge in the kitchen and removing a beer from the fridge, the specific purpose in virtue of which your perambulatory trajectory toward the fridge angles through the kitchen doorway, as opposed to taking you directly toward the fridge and smack into the intervening wall, normally will color the phenomenology of your action without becoming explicitly conscious at all. And in some cases, sufficiently fine-grained aspects of one’s action might lack even this kind of subtle, non-explicit, phenomenological tinge of specific-purpose phenomenology. For instance, when you grab a can of peas from the grocery shelf, there might be nothing in the phenomenology that smacks even slightly of a specific purpose for grabbing the particular can you do rather than any of several other equally accessible ones. (Indeed, maybe there is no specific purpose for grabbing this can rather than any of the others, let alone a purpose that leaves a phenomenological trace.)
This is so even though there certainly are uses of ‘could’, especially in contexts of moral evaluation, under which it would be correct to say about such a situation, “I could not do otherwise, because of the coercive threat.”
This is not to deny, of course, that there is indeed a distinctive phenomenology of effort of will that sometimes is present in the phenomenology of doing. The point is just that this aspect is not always present. A related phenomenological feature, often but not always present, is the phenomenology of trying—which itself is virtually always a dimension of the phenomenology of effort of will, and which often (but not always) includes a phenomenologically discernible element of uncertainty about success. (Sometimes the phenomenological aspect of voluntariness attaches mainly to the trying dimension of the phenomenology of doing. When you happen to succeed at what you were trying to do but were not at all confident you could accomplish it—e.g., sinking the 10 ball into the corner pocket of the pool table—the success aspect is not experienced as something directly under voluntary control.)
Living with the non-reality of agency would not necessarily mean ceasing to have agentive experience. That is probably psychologically impossible, for normal humans. (It is also psychologically impossible for a normal human to cease having color experience, for example, even though one philosophically respectable view about color asserts that there are no colors and that color experience is systematically non-veridical.)
Also, various views about morals and moral responsibility could be wedded to the position, analogous to the different views that have been defended by hard determinists. Among the possibilities are (i) that the institution of morality is totally indefensible, or (ii) that some aspects of morality are defensible, but not those involving notions like responsibility, blameworthiness, and praiseworthiness, or (iii) that people can behave morally responsibly and irresponsibly, and can deserve praise or blame for their behavior, even though their behavior does not constitute genuine action.
In Horgan (forthcoming) I argue that there are good evolutionary-biological reasons why agentive phenomenology and state-causal phenomenology are mutually exclusionary. I also argue there is no good evolutionary-biological reason why agentive phenomenology should have incompatibilist satisfaction conditions, especially since such extremely demanding satisfaction conditions, if they really do accrue to the presentational content of agentive exerience, are phenomenologically non-manifest. These arguments throw further into doubt any inference from the fact that agentive phenomenology and state-causal phenomenology are mutually exclusionary to the conclusion that agentive presentational content has incompatibilist satisfaction conditions.
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Acknowledgements
This paper elaborates upon and further develops some themes from Horgan (forthcoming), a paper I presented at the 2005 conference on Mental Causation, Externalism, and Self-Knowledge at the University of Tuebingen. My thanks to the participants of that conference for their feedback, and to Christian Sachse for his commentary. Thanks too to Michael Gill, George Graham, Uriah Kriegel, Keith Lehrer, Cei Maslen, Sean Nichols, John Pollock, Susanna Siegel, John Tienson, and Mark Timmons for ongoing discussion and feedback, and to two anonymous referees for comments on an earlier version.
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Horgan, T. Mental Causation and the Agent-Exclusion Problem. Erkenn 67, 183–200 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9067-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9067-9