Abstract
The view that first-person (de se) mental content is essential to the explanation of action in general is a strong essential indexicality thesis. A weaker essential indexicality claim is that de se mental content is an essential ingredient of intentional action. An argument by Bermúdez for the former thesis and an argument from Babb in support of the latter are discussed in Section 2, and for reasons presented there it seems that both arguments are unsound and the conclusions are false as well. However, the discussion of their arguments helps us identify a certain class of intentional action, and an apparently very large class, the members of which are guaranteed to have de se origin. This class of intentional action is identified in Sections 3 and 4 and it is shown that necessarily, any member of this class has its origin in indexical, specifically, de se mental content.
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Notes
Morgan (2019) argues that intentions, while not essentially de se, are essentially de nunc.
Perry presents the messy shopper example not only to show the importance of indexical content to action, but also to question a traditional account of the propositional attitudes he calls the “doctrine of propositions.” Other widely discussed examples used to illustrate the distinctive nature of indexical mental content include, among others, Perry’s (1977) case of amnesiac Lingens lost in the library and Lewis’ (1979) “two gods” example, cases in which individuals know all the non-indexical facts without knowing who or where they are. Both Perry and Lewis note that they are indebted to Castañeda’s work on first-person thought. (Perry addresses de se indexical content by distinguishing the object of a belief from the belief-state of the subject, while Lewis favors a centered-world account of the content of the attitudes with properties as the objects.)
Cappelen and Dever (2017) discuss adding a ceteris paribus clause to premise (1) to the effect that normal conditions obtain and they show that this addition does not save the argument for IICa.
Those who believe that some actions, or at least some possible actions, lack a de se or otherwise indexical origin might endorse the following formulation of the doctrine of the essential indexical offered by Prosser (2015, p. 213): “There is a class of actions, CA, such that no action in CA can be performed by an agent who lacks the relevant egocentric mental state, the presence of which is normally indicated by the use of an egocentric indexical.” Prosser goes on to identify the actions included in class CA with the help of the notion of first-person redundant mental representations.
Although, to be clear, it is a truism only when read as the de dicto claim that necessarily, if A is an intentional action, then an intention is involved. The following de re claim does not follow: if A is an intentional action, then necessarily an intention is involved. For depending on how actions are to be individuated, an action that happens to be an intentional action could be the very same action without being an intentional action.
Morgan mentions Millikan’s idea that each of us thinks of oneself by means of an “active self name” that leads directly to the performance of actions. Millikan writes, “My inner ‘RM’ is indeed special. Let us call it @‘RM’, or RM’s ‘active self name’. It names a person whom I know, under that name, how to manipulate directly; I know how to effect her behavior. But in order to know how to manipulate this person, why would I need to think indexical thoughts? What has knowhow to do with indexicality?” (1990, p. 730).
Here’s another case Cappelen and Dever present: “Clark Kent has lost track of the fact that he is Superman. In fact, he has been tracking Superman’s past activities, finding him a suspicious character. Superman comes to be on trial for sabotaging a power plant. Clark Kent is put on the stand (in front of a prosecutor, judge, and audience, all of whom are aware of his identity with Superman) and asked about what he’s discovered in his Superman-tracking. After Kent gives out one particular piece of information, very damning in context, the prosecutor declares ‘Mr. Kent, don’t you realize that you’ve just admitted sabotaging the power plant?’” (2013, p. 164). According to Cappelen and Dever, the prosecutor’s remark is true despite the fact that Clark Kent does not believe that he himself sabotaged the power plant. I’m not sure about their verdict. Since Clark Kent is not aware that he is Superman, it does seem at least a bit misleading to say that he admitted to sabotaging the power plant. Cappelen and Dever recognize that Clark Kent “would deny the relevant ‘first-person thought’ to himself” (p. 164). But this would seem to be why Clark Kent would deny the prosecutor’s declaration and insist that he did no such thing as admitting to sabotaging the power plant. If Clark Kent were reminded that he is Superman, then he would realize that he had testified against himself, but this would not amount to him realizing that he had previously admitted to committing the crime.
While mentioning Perry-style cases, Kaplan writes: “If I see, reflected in a window, the image of a man whose pants appear to be on fire, my behavior is sensitive to whether I think, ‘His pants are on fire’ or ‘My pants are on fire’, though the object of thought may be the same” (Kaplan, 1989, p. 533). Kaplan uses the example to show how the difference in cognitive significance between “His pants are on fire” and “My pants are on fire” lies in the difference in character (as opposed to content) of “his” and “my.”
While Babb, following Castañeda, regards the first-person component as characteristic of intention generally, it is doubtful that there is a first-person ingredient to all intentions, for reasons mentioned in Section 2.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for the journal for motivating me to consider this line of objection.
Davidson (1963, §1) views the “primary reason” for an action as a pro-attitude toward actions of a certain kind and a belief that the action in question is of that kind; also see Davidson’s (1978) characterization of the pro-attitude as an evaluative judgement that the action is good or desirable. The plan involved might be considered a type of means-end reasoning, which suggests that “an intention is a conclusion of practical reasoning” (Harman, 1976, p. 453), and the plan arguably provides the motivation for performing the action, where in the simplest case, “[b]eing moved to act by an intention” may be viewed as “acting for the sake of an end” (Setiya, 2007, p. 51). See Bratman (1987) on intention and planning. Regarding knowledge/belief, Anscombe (1957, §6) proposes that doing something intentionally requires knowing that one is doing it (knowing without observation, §8). See Harman’s (1976, §I) defense of the view that intending to do something requires believing one will do it; for Audi (1973) what’s required is believing it’s probable that one will do it. Davidson objects to the knowledge/belief requirement (e.g., 1978, pp. 49–53). For summary and discussion of the literature on intention, see Setiya (2022).
I am certainly not implying that the authors mentioned in footnote 14 are striving for accounts free of de se content ascription. Conditions (i)–(iv) are just meant as examples of how one might try to explain intending to do some action without de se content ascription.
S intending that she herself perform A is necessary for S intending to A, but arguably it is not sufficient. As Higginbotham reports (based on an example he attributes to Michael Martin), “[w]hen I intend to stop smoking, I intend that I am the agent of my stopping smoking; but when I merely intend that I stop smoking, there is no implication of my agency in the stopping” (2003, p. 517). “The latter intention might be fulfilled, say, by paying someone forcibly to remove cigarettes from my person whenever I am caught with them” (p. 511). See also Castañeda (1975, pp. 168–9) on intending to bring about.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out to me. (Recall the related point in footnote 5 about Babb’s claim that intentions are essential to intentional action.)
And what I mean here and for the remainder is that someone’s intention-to action is caused by that same individual’s intending to act. I leave out the extra wording for ease of exposition. (Incidentally, the individual could be some particular collective, assuming that collectives can act as a result of intending to act.)
It is worth noting that one can accept (1)–(3) while also accepting Cappelen and Dever’s (2020) argument that since corporations act, and corporations do not have de se mental states (or, at least, de se states are not required for corporations to act), de se states are not essential for action. One can accept this line of reasoning while also insisting that unless corporations have de se mental states, they do not perform intention-to action.
Also see Tiffany’s (2000, §II) point about opaque context being the culprit in Perry-style cases.
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Francescotti, R. Intention, Action, and De Se Indexicality. Acta Anal (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-024-00588-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-024-00588-1