Abstract
This paper argues that habits, just like beliefs, can guide intentional action. To do this, a variety of real-life cases where a person acts habitually but contrary to her beliefs are discussed. The cases serve as dissociations showing that intentional agency is possible without doxastic guidance. The upshot is a model for thinking about the rationality of habitual action and the rationalizing role that habits can play in it. The model highlights the role that our history and institutions play in shaping what actions become habitual for us.
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Notes
Versions of this idea can be found in Davidson (1980, pp. 3–5, 85–86, 231–232, 266–267) and other causal approaches to agency (Audi 1994; Smith 2010; Arpaly and Schroder 2014). Even detractors of the causal theory have seen doxastic guidance as a principle constitutive of it (See Ruben 2003). The idea, however, goes beyond this type of approach. There are Kantian (Korsgaard 1997) and volitionist (Ginet 1990; Wallace 2001) versions of it too. Here, I discuss the challenge in the context of a causal theory but the challenge is meant to be broader than this.
Although philosophers have said little about it, when habitual action has been discussed, it has often been presented as a counter-example to psychological conceptions of intentional agency (Pollard 2006; Di Nucci 2011. But see Douskos 2019 for a nice exception). Psychologists interested in automatic goal-pursuit have theorized to a slightly larger degree about habits. Aarts and Dijksterhuis (2000), for example, define habits are goal-response associations that become active without intent. Wood and Neal (2007) conceptualize them as stimulus–response associations that structure behavior without mediation of actual goals. While useful for capturing some forms of automaticity, these ways of thinking about habits are removed from interest in intentional agency.
For discussion of the case, see People vs. Mehserle, #A130654, 206 Cal. App. 4th 1125, 142, Cal. Reprt. 3d 423 (2012). In what follows, I use the evidence and discussion documented in the court case as a guide to describe what happened that night in Oakland. Obviously, as with any other real-life case, the truth about Mehserle’s mental states might turn out to be somewhat different. Also, in following the court case, I do not mean to deny that police shootings (in the US and elsewhere) sometimes get falsely presented as non-intentional. But exploring these larger issues concerning police brutality and their accountability for it is something beyond this essay.
Calling something a “slip,” therefore, is not to excuse it or even to diminish the gravity of its occurrence. However, discussing responsibility (moral or legal) for slips is beyond the scope of this paper. See Amaya and Doris (2014) for discussion.
Between 2001 and 2009, at least nine cases of gun/taser confusions were reported in the US, according to AELE Law library. See “Weapon Confusion and Civil Liability.” 2012 (6) AELE Mo. L. J. 101.
In cases like this where there is limited amount of information, it is hard to know how influential these prejudices really were at the individual level (Payne et al. 2018). Even so, accepting what has been said so far, the presence of racial biases in Mesherle would help explain why he made the decision to subdue Grant but would not explain why, having made that decision, he slipped and grabbed the wrong weapon.
Obviously, even when a person slips, some beliefs will guide the execution of her action. The point is that the guidance is not exhausted by the agent’s beliefs; habits play a role too. That is why, as we shall discuss below, the slip cannot be reduced to a doxastic mistake.
Thus understood, habitual behaviors need not be observed with the frequency with which, say, some compulsive behaviors (e.g. biting one’s nails) can be seen. The frequency in which they are manifested, as it will become clear below, depends upon how often the person forms the type of intention the habit is supposed to subserve. See Douskos (2019, pp. 4312–4313), who uses for these purposes the term “habitual routines.”
See Douskos (2019), who distinguishes habits and skills, in these terms. In brief, the person who displays a skill is attentive to the way she is acting: how she is doing what she intends. The person who acts habitually is relatively unencumbered by the how of what she is doing.
Although slips typically involve reduced attention to performance, this reduction does not result in some kind of unconsciousness antagonistic to intentional agency. See Bermúdez (2017), Christensen et al (2016), and Fridland (2014) for a discussion of how much consciousness there generally is in skilled and habitual behaviors.
There are various ways of diagnosing what is deviant about deviant chains. Here, I consider the diagnosis offered by Bishop (1989) in terms of content sensitivity, which is standard (certainly, not unanimous) among action theorists. Note, at any rate, that the goal here is not to advance a solution to the problem of deviance, but to show why assimilating slips to these cases will not help address the present challenge.
Habituation might be the product of a variety of interventions (e.g., classical conditioning, farmacological inductions, etc.) that lie “outside the space of reasons.” It is in these cases like this that acting out of habit is clearly not acting for a reason.
Arruda and Povinelli (2018) note how the literature on reasons for action tends to focus on approaches based on endorsement and justification. The present proposal is an alternative to this standard approach, in line with what they call a “directing,” as opposed to an “endorsement,” relation. Note, at any rate, that not all cases of acting for reasons in the absence of endorsement are historical in the sense noted above.
Schwitzgebel discusses examples of beliefs that are not fully integrated with the behavioral trajectories of their subjects: what he calls cases of in-between belief. For such cases, he seems to agree with the point made above: “we believe that P,” he says, “if our actions and reactions generally reflect a P-ish take on the world” (2010, p. 541).
Discussing the “Moses illusion,” Sorensen (2011) argues that some slips can eventually result in variegated behavior. This is indeed possible. If a slip is not corrected, the agent can become disposed to form a belief accordant with her behavior. See Audi (1994) for the distinction between dispositions to believe and beliefs.
Dispositionalists about belief have traditionally been the advocates the fragmentation hypothesis. There is a recent representationalist version of it in Mandelbaum (2014) and Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum (2018). The main issue dividing these approaches is whether beliefs are relations to structured representations, not so much the issue of fragmentation. Accordingly, their discussion can be set aside here.
This is not because the agent cannot access her state of mind at the time of the mistake. She can access it in whichever way it is required by first person knowledge. Still, having realized that she made a mistake, she might not be able articulate a coherent picture of her state of mind at the time. What was I thinking?
The distinction between the evaluation of performances and processes lies at the of Herbert Simon’s (1978) classic distinction between substantive and procedural rationality. Michael Bratman (1987, p. 5.2) also draws a similar distinction between the rationality of having general policies for (not) reconsidering plans and the adequacy of specific episodes of (non) reconsideration.
Versions of this paper were presented at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, the Gothenburg Workshop on Moral Responsibility, the Institute Jean Nicod, and the Universities of San Diego, Sheffield, Tubingen, and Washington University in St. Louis. Al Mele, Arnon Cahen, Sarah Robins, John Doris, Neil Levy, Roy Sorensen, Manuel Vargas, and Allison Wolff gave me feedback for which I am extremely grateful. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers that helped shape this paper into its final version. Work on this paper was supported by Grant #60845 from the John Templeton Foundation.
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Work on this paper was funded by the John Templeton Foundation, Grant # 60845.
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Amaya, S. Out of habit. Synthese 198, 11161–11185 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02780-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02780-3