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Time and Action: Impulsivity, Habit, Strategy

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Abstract

Granting that various mental events might form the antecedents of an action, what is the mental event that is the proximate cause of action? The present article reconsiders the methodology for addressing this question: Intention and its varieties cannot be properly analyzed if one ignores the evolutionary constraints that have shaped action itself, such as the trade-off between efficient timing and resources available, for a given stake. On the present proposal, three types of action, impulsive, routine and strategic, are designed to satisfy the trade-off above when achieving goals of each type. While actions of the first two types depend on non-conceptual appraisals of a given intensity and valence, strategic intentions have a propositional format and guide action within longer-term executive frameworks involving prospective memory.

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Notes

  1. For a review of the objections raised against belief-desire causal theories of action, see Pacherie (2002).

  2. See Searle (1983).

  3. See Bratman (1987), Mele (1992), Pacherie (2006), Proust (2003), Searle (1983).

  4. E.g. attention available, level of motivation, presence of acquired know-how.

  5. E.g., instrumental mediations, cooperation with others, temporal constraints.

  6. See Hursthouse (1991), Pacherie (2002), Scarantino (2014), Searle (1983).

  7. For a detailed defense of this proposal, see Proust (2014a).

  8. Barrett and Bar (2009).

  9. See Proust (2014a).

  10. Prinz (2004), p. 228. While conceding, p. 229, that valence markers are “internal commands to sustain or eliminate a somatic state by selecting an appropriate action”, Prinz considers emotions to be perceptual, rather than agentive.

  11. Millikan (1995). This feature of impulsive action is also discussed by Bar-On (2013) and by Scarantino (2014).

  12. In the terms of Dreyfus and Kelly (2007).

  13. See Proust (2014a).

  14. See Pacherie (2002, 2011) & Proust (2003).

  15. Lee et al. (2014).

  16. See Niv et al. (2006), p. 377.

  17. Searle (1983), Bratman (1987), Mele (1992).

  18. Lee et al. (2014), p.695.

  19. McDaniel and Einstein (2000).

  20. Burgess et al. (2001).

  21. Smith (2003).

  22. Lee et al. (2014).

  23. Notably, evidence for a comparison signal reflecting the difference in reliability between the two systems has been found in the rostral cingulate cortex. Lee et al. (2014), p. 693.

  24. Koechlin et al. (2003). See also Fuster (1989), Grafman (2002).

  25. See Damasio et al. (1994).

  26. For a defense of motor intentions, see Pacherie (2006, 2011).

  27. Koechlin et al. (2003).

  28. See Proust (2013), Chapter 12.

  29. Proust (2013).

  30. See Couchman et al (2012).

  31. Koriat (2000).

  32. For example, the neural activity recorded in rats’ orbitofrontal cortex when attempting to categorize olfactory stimuli was found to correlate with their predictive behavior (i.e., accepting or rejecting a task trial). See Kepecs et al. (2008). Similar patterns have been found in other species, including humans. For a discussion and review of the literature, see Fleming et al. (2012), and Proust (2013), pp. 99 sqq.

  33. Carruthers and Ritchie (2012).

  34. See Balcomb and Gerken (2008), Bernard et al. (submitted).

  35. See the review by Greifeneder and Unkelbach (2013).

  36. See Proust (2014b).

  37. This consists in associating the items to be remembered with specific familiar physical locations, for example the rooms of the agent’s house.

  38. For a concept of planning compatible with a bounded rationality, see Bratman (1987).

  39. We noted, in Section 2.1.2, that fencers are trained to act impulsively rather than on the basis of their SAs. This is also a case of a critical use of fluency. The difference with the present case is that moral agents have a much wider scope of decisions open to them, in contexts that are also more variable.

  40. Reber (2013), p. 174.

  41. Reber (2013), p. 175.

  42. Shiffrin and Schneider (1977).

  43. Slingerland (2001), p. 104.

  44. Frankfurt (1988).

  45. Schwarz and Clore (2007).

  46. Ekman (1988).

  47. Frijda (1986), p. 191.

  48. Pacherie (2002), p. 80.

  49. For a similar remark, associated with a different solution to this issue, see Scarantino (2014), p. 174.

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Acknowledgments

All my thanks to my colleague Dick Carter, for useful feedback on a prior version, and for his linguistic revision of the present article. I also thank Matias Baltazar, Laurence Conty, Terry Eskenazy, Martin Fortier, John Michael and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and/or bibliographical suggestions. This research has been supported by an ERC Advanced Grant “Dividnorm” # 269616, and by two institutional grants: ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC and ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL.

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    Joëlle Proust

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Proust, J. Time and Action: Impulsivity, Habit, Strategy. Rev.Phil.Psych. 6, 717–743 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0224-1

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