Abstract
Our view of ourselves as well as our outlook on the world depends on what we take ourselves to be able to do. In the received philosophical literature, this attitude has not received the attention it deserves. This paper approaches the sense of ability with a series of conflicting intuitions concerning its conceptual structure. It is then argued that an affective account of the attitude in question is likely to be more successful in dealing with these issues than the simple doxastic account implicit in most of the received views. The basic way in which agents are aware of what they can do should be understood as a (existential) feeling rather than merely as a belief. The paper concludes with a consideration concerning the bearings of this result on the analysis of joint action.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Throwing one’s rich spinster aunt from the train would be an example for the former case, opening yet another bottle after one has emptied the last remaining one an example for the latter.
- 3.
Most philosophers of action use a distinction of the sort of the one between prior intention and intention-in-action (Searle 1983). Prior intentions are the “plans” of (or “projects” for) an action that do not, as such, involve any practical engagement; one might have a prior intention without currently doing anything about it, such as in the case of the intention to spend next year’s summer in Spain. Intentions-in-action, by contrast, are the feature by virtue of which a given complex of behavior is an action. Along similar lines, Michael Bratman (1987) distinguishes between future-directed and present-directed intention; Alfred Mele (1992) has the distinction between distal and proximate intention. This distinction is usually taken to be a matter of the temporal structure – the prior intention comes first and terminates in the intention-in-action –, but one can also interpret this difference as a difference in terms of the kind of practical reasoning at work in these cases, and of the kind of representation of the content. Prior intentions are a matter of deliberation, intentions-in-action a matter of implementation and practical skills (with different sets of abilities involved). It seems obvious that our sense of ability extends to all levels of intentionality, ranging from a sense of the reach of our limbs (or, in the case of internal actions, the scope of mental resources available to us) up to the kinds of plans to which we can commit ourselves.
- 4.
In his “Impossible Doings” (1992), as well as in some later papers on the topic, Kirk Ludwig contested that claim. Ludwig discusses the following example. P assumes (with certainty) that the battery of his car is dead. Upon another person’s request, he turns the ignition key. Contrary to what he expects, the engine starts. Ludwig claims that it would be wrong to say that P started the engine unintentionally. I agree with Ludwig that there are some cases of trying the subjectively impossible where “trying” does not function as a proper action term. I argue, however, that in such cases, the agent must take himself to have a chance at success, however minimal, which might be in conflict with his conscious assessment of the situation. Sometimes the agent’s intentional self-confidence is not in tune with their beliefs concerning their ability. If this is true, Ludwig’s point does not prove that it is not the case that people cannot intend to do what they take themselves to be unable to carry out. The question is how to understand the “taking”: insofar as it is mere belief, Ludwig is right; insofar as it is confidence, he is not.
- 5.
This is a point taken up by Robert Sugden in his analysis of team trust (Sugden 2000).
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Acknowledgements
I presented earlier versions of this paper on conferences and workshops at the universities of Basel, Berkeley, and Bielefeld. I would like to thank the audiences there, and especially Kevin Mulligan and Kirk Ludwig.
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Schmid, H.B. (2011). Feeling Up to It – The Sense of Ability in the Phenomenology of Action. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Lehrer, K., Schmid, H. (eds) Self-Evaluation. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 116. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1266-9_12
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