Reasons as Non-Causal, Context-Placing Explanations

Reasons as Non-Causal, Context-Placing Explanations I. It is widely supposed that everyday explanations couched in terms of reasons, motives, intentions, etc. for an agent’s actions depend upon law-governed causal relations between states, events, or properties which ordinary mental terms are alleged to pick out or in causal relations between to-be-discovered realisers of those supposed states. This is the root idea of functionalism. Originally, functionalism was proposed as a theory about the meaning of mental terms that are used everyday in non-theoretical discourse (Lewis 1972, 249-58). Our common sense or everyday concept of pain, on this account, is thought to pick out an (unspecified) inner state of an organism or system that occupies a certain causal role in mediating between other inner mental states, input and behavioural output. This causal role is to be specified by common sense platitudes: e.g., that pain is likely to be caused by tissue damage and result in avoidance behaviour. Another version suggests that the role is rather to be found by the traditional methods of a priori philosophical analysis (Shoemaker 1984). This approach would, like the first, dovetail with the idea that mental concepts’ primary domain is common sense explanation but only if the methods of a priori philosophy are to make explicit what is already implicit in our (common) use of mental concepts. Psychofunctionalists, however, attempt to break the tie with ordinary concepts. They agree with other functionalists that ordinary mental concepts function to pick out a causal role realised by some or other inner (physical) state. They also agree that a complete, constitutive account of the second-order or functional states will be given by a story outlining the causal relations between the occupants of such states and their relation to input, output, and other mental states. But they believe, not only that the occupants of this role, but the role itself are to be discovered by empirical psychology (Rey 1997, 187; Block 1978/1980, 268-305). But this conception of the use of mental terms and of the kind of explanation they serve was disputed by philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein: those who conceived their task to be the untangling of philosophical perplexities thought to arise from inattention to logical or “grammatical” detail. Such philosophers pointed to differences between the employment of mental concepts in everyday reason explanations and of their (alleged) counterparts in psychological theories—those psychological theories, at least, which resonated to the “comfortingly causal talk characteristic of the hard sciences.” The expression is Fodor’s in his 1968, xix. They argued that the everyday employment by teachers, lawyers, priests, and doctors of mental concepts explain in a different sense of ‘explain’ from that favoured by the hard sciences. Wishing to emphasise the unlikeness between the two senses, these philosophers drew attention to the differences by contrasting reason explanation with causal explanation and by insisting on important qualifications to the suggestion that reasons, motives, and intentions are causes. It looked to some commentators that these philosophers were taking for granted a hopelessly simplistic and clearly mistaken view both about the concept of causation and about how causation works in non-mental domains. Thus, a number of philosophers today, though somewhat sympathetic with the writings of Wittgenstein and those he inspired, nonetheless refuse to fight the battle over causation. Hornsby (2004), McDowell (1998), and Rudder-Baker (1995) are some examples. Although I shall not have much to say against these (in many ways kindred) positions, my hunch is that there may be good reasons for resisting the assimilation of importantly different senses of ‘explain’; such differences, I suspect, tend to be obscured by the appropriation by both camps of the concept of causation. In this paper, I would like to trace the decline of the ill-understood Wittgensteinian perspective—paying close attention in particular to the writings of Melden, Ryle, and Anscombe—in order to bring this particular orientation back into view. In section II, I shall sketch my own understanding of the position, and, in so doing, answer some of the criticism of Davidson and Fodor. In section III, I shall contrast the Wittgensteinian view with the instrumentalist and realist ones associated with Daniel Dennett as well as with the behaviourism (mistakenly) attributed to Ryle. I suggest that because on the Wittgensteinian/Rylean view mental concepts discharge their explanatory role other than by referring to a state, relation, event, or property whose nature is in question, the position fails to find its place on the metaphysical map charted by realists and their irrealist opponents. In section IV, I shall offer some hypotheses as to why reason explanation as non-causal, context-placing explanations have been resisted. II. Causation, A.I. Melden (1961) said, is one of the “snare” words of philosophy. Looking carefully at how this word is used will not allow us to distinguish it from ‘reason’ or even from ‘explanation’: indeed, some use the words ‘causation’ and ‘explanation’ interchangeably. Compare: “Words like ‘explanation’, ‘law’, ‘rule’, ‘principle’, ‘why’, ‘because’, ‘cause’, ‘reason’, ‘govern’, ‘necessitate’, etc. have a range of typically different senses. Mechanism seemed to be a menace [to the possibility of free will] because it was assumed that the use of these terms in mechanical theories is their sole use; that all ‘why’ questions are answerable in terms of laws of motion’” (Ryle, 1949, 76). Substitute ‘physics’ and ‘physical’ for ‘mechanism’ and ‘mechanical’ and ‘physical laws’ for ‘laws of motion’ and you have a nice statement of what we might call, with a nod to Ryle, the “bogey of physicalism”. On this use, to deny that the mental is causally efficacious is to deny that the mental is explanatory and this (correctly) strikes most people as absurd. Nonetheless, there was (and, as we shall see, still is) a certain attraction to a broadly Humean view about causation; enough so that it will be worthwhile to bring out the differences between the explanations. I think Anscombe (1983) is right in saying the concept of causation is as general as the concept of a factor, so that it is misleading to talk about ‘the’ causal relation. Thus, like Melden, I am not particularly interested in defending Hume’s account, which has been disputed from every angle. It has, for example, been doubted whether causation is best seen as a relation between events (Hume said between two ‘objects’); it has been questioned whether necessity is involved, whether a singular causal statement implies a pattern or regularity of any kind, and so forth. But it is roughly this use of ‘cause’ which Davidson had in mind when he argued that reasons are causes and is, for example, accepted by Fodor. (See the text below for more discussion.) And it is this use which tempts one to construe verbs like ‘believes’, ‘thinks’, ‘wants’ as picking out mental events or occurrences conceived as hypothetical or theoretical entities. This latter picture is my quarry. On this broadly Humean understanding, causation is a relation between two logically and temporally distinguishable events. This is sometimes accompanied by the idea that the relation is explanatory insofar as it is subsumable under natural laws or law-like generalizations, which it is the business of the empirical sciences to discover. Let us agree to stipulate for the purposes here that we will understand a causal relation minimally as a relation between two logically and temporally distinguishable events. The position I wish to bring back into focus says that what it is for an action to be in execution of an intention or for it to be explicable by reasons is not a matter of there being a causal relation (in this sense) between intention or reasons and action. If causation is to be thus understood, the pattern in virtue of which a person’s intentions, motives, or reasons explain her action is not eo ipso causal. This formulation allows us to concede that the concept of intention, for example, may be correctly applied, on some occasion, to designate an event that can legitimately be classed as ‘mental’: a state of a person or an event in her history that can form part of an intuitively plausible causal chain issuing in action (see text below and examples in footnote 11); it denies, pace Davidson, that the concept of intention’s explanatory value depends on the existence of any such causal relation. Note that these are reasons why the thesis I am defending here is not aptly described as denying either mental causation or the “reality” of the mental: though of course it does deny aspects of mental realism as this is commonly understood. It should be noted, further, that on this view I am recommending the distinction between reasons and causes is not always a firm one. Following Anscombe we can agree that my hanging up my hat because my host said “Hang up your hat” is one in which the intuitive distinction starts to vanish: it depends on the circumstances whether we would call this a cause or a reason. (1957, §15) For Melden, the motivation to construe motives, intentions, and reasons as constituents in a causal explanation of action is symptomatic of a misguided attempt to give an account of how an event construed as a mere bodily movement (an arm’s rising) can be construed as an action (someone’s raising his arm). No further description of the performance in respect of its properties as a bodily movement could possibly disclose that additional feature that makes it an action. This, Melden tells us, is for two reasons. First, the occurrence of a mere bodily happening (say, an event in the brain) does not have the logical force to turn a bodily movement into an action (and this would be so even if events of the one kind enter into lawful relations with events of the same type as the bodily movement to be explained). But, second, if we hypothesise the occurrence of something with the right sort of logical force (and call it an intention, a motive, a reason, or a belief-desire pair) then we must, in doing so, presuppose the relation between it and the action that this mental occurrence was invoked to explain. Why? Because in order for motives, intentions, and reasons to be explanatory, they must be motives, intentions, or reasons for the action in question. But if motives, intentions, and reasons are introduced in the first place to explain how a bodily movement (the arm’s rising) becomes an action (someone’s raising his arm) then the specification of the motive or intention cannot simply presuppose the action, on pain of circularity. A motive is a motive for some action either performed or considered; hence a motive, far from being a factor which when conjoined with any bodily movement thereby constitutes an action, actually presupposes the very concept of an action itself. (1961, 83) This is the kernel of Melden’s argument but it is not easy to understand and in any case is unlikely to move the contemporary philosopher of mind who learned in her first, introductory course on the subject that intentional states enter into both logical relations with other states (in virtue of their content) and causal relations with other states (in virtue of their form). To such a philosopher, Melden’s criticism amounts to the denial of a philosophical platitude. So more work is needed, it seems, in order to make the argument clearer. The gist of the argument I shall develop is this. Correctly to ascribe an intention, motive, or reason in such a way as to display its logico-grammatical relation to action is already to attempt an explanation of the action by putting it into a context that makes it understandable. To suppose that there are events that are designated by the reason- or motive- expression is not only unnecessary; it obscures the way reason-explanation functions. Davidson claims that it would be a mistake to conclude from the fact that placing the action in a larger pattern explains it, we now understand the sort of explanation involved, and that “cause and effect form the sort of pattern that explains the effect in the sense of ‘explain’ that we understand as well as any” (1980, 10). Davidson challenges the opponents of the causal view to identify what other pattern of explanation illustrates the relation between reason and action if they wish to sustain the claim that the pattern is not one of cause and effect. Let us try to meet this challenge. The Wittgensteinian position starts out, I claim, by assuming that motives, intentions, and reasons can be used successfully in explanations of actions and then it asks, when they are successful, how they explain. In many cases, attributions of motives, intentions, and reasons explain a performance by characterising it as an action of a certain kind. This is already to distinguish an explanation in terms of motives and intentions from a causal explanation, Melden tells us, since a causal explanation suggested by the Humean picture usually takes it for granted that the event to be explained is already fully characterised as the kind of event it is; a causal explanation offers us “an account of how it is that an event whose characteristics are already known is brought to pass” (1961, 88). Of course it is consistent with this, as Melden himself immediately acknowledges, that the effect-event can be described in terms of its cause as an injury to the shoulder, say, might be described as a sunburn. But there must, on this view, be two logically independent (and therefore independently describable) events that enter into the causal relation. This is a condition that Davidson accepts; See (1980, 12) where he suggests a number of candidates for such an event. so, too, does Fodor: It is, of course, true that if X is the cause of Y, then there must be some description that is true of X and that is logically independent of the description “Y’s cause”, and there must be some description that is true of Y and that is logically independent of the description “X’s effect”. (1968, 35) Fodor adds, however, that this demand would be satisfied if the materially sufficient conditions for having a certain motive could be formulated in neurological terms; indeed, it would be satisfied by the existence of any state of affairs that is associated one-to-one with a psychological state by laws, empirical generalisations, or even by accident. Thus, Fodor alleges, the appeal to Humean strictures is too weak for Melden’s purposes. But both Davidson and Fodor seem to interpret Melden’s claim that a cause must be “logically distinct from the alleged effect” (1961, 52) as dictating the vocabulary that must be used to pick out the supposed mental event which—in order for it to count as a cause at all (it is agreed by everyone here concerned)—must have some logically independent description (whether we know what it is or not). But I read Melden, by contrast, as calling into question the idea that such a mental event or occurrence must exist. His argument, as I see it, is that the existence of such occurrences is not required for the concepts of intention, motive, and reason, etc. to discharge their explanatory role, thus throwing into question the whole idea that this explanatory role is causal. This, in any case, is the argument I shall develop. In order to bring to light some of the features of a contrasting, non-causal pattern of explanation, let us consider a simple case first—one removed from the context of reasons, intentions and motives. A chemistry student who had to leave the class early might find it puzzling why his teacher wrote cat on the board. We can imagine his puzzlement relieved when his classmate explains, “Because she was writing ‘catalyst’—you left the room before she completed the word.” This ‘because’ introduces an explanatory context, but it is not the sort of explanation in which one event (logically independent or not) follows another. Intuitively speaking, there is one event (the writing of ‘catalyst’) which has not been understood. The student may have construed it as the writing of the word ‘cat’ or as the writing of the sequence of letters ‘c’, ‘a’, and ‘t’. The performance may have been puzzling on either construal. The answer serves to re-characterise what happened so that it—as newly described—is no longer puzzling. The chemistry teacher’s writing ‘catalyst’ on the board is, I assume for the sake of the example, more understandable than her writing ‘c’, ‘a’, and ‘t’. This is not because we have now made out any mysterious connection between the occurrences of two contingently related events—the writing of ‘c’, ‘a’, and ‘t’, on the one hand and the writing of ‘catalyst’, on the other. For even if these were considered (implausibly) two distinct events, they would not be contingently related: writing the English word ‘catalyst’ entails writing the letters ‘c’, ‘a’, and ‘t’. Nor is there any reason to expect that we may find some other description of the performance of writing the letters that would qualify it as a logically independent event, in such a way that events of this newly-described kind enter into a law-like connection with events typed as the writing of the word ‘catalyst’. The performance was puzzling only because it was conceived or described as the writing of the letters ‘c’ ‘a’ and ‘t’ or as the word ‘cat’ instead of as the writing of the word ‘catalyst’. The teacher’s writing ‘catalyst’ on the board is not puzzling, I assume, because it is part of a general pattern of behaviour that “belongs to” or “is at home in” a chemistry lesson. The ‘because’ in “She wrote the letters ‘c’, ‘a’, and ‘t’ because she was writing ‘catalyst’”, then, signals a different pattern of explanation from the causal pattern in which one event follows another. Here we have a clear-cut case of a non-causal, context-placing explanation. If part of Davidson’s challenge here is to say how writing ‘catalyst’ on the board “belongs to” or “is at home in” a chemistry class, then it must be admitted that not much more can be said (except one that issues reminders about the kinds of things one studies in chemistry); at least there is no answer that can be given in more fundamental terms. One of the convictions of the position I am defending is that the ability to see actions as fitting into familiar patterns comes about through training and through a shared form of life and not in general through explicit instruction or through prior theoretical (rule-following) operations. Anscombe’s account of an intentional action as one for which a certain sense of the question “Why?” is given application is a sophisticated attempt to describe in more detail what “belonging to” or “being at home in” involves in relating the action to the agent’s motives and reasons but it, too, appeals to our (considered) judgements about what makes sense without attempting to explain this. For a discussion of the process of acculturation that enables us to see actions in new ways, see the final chapters of Melden 1961. For an argument against explaining this ability in terms of prior theoretical operations, see Tanney 2000. This case can be used as a model to develop an elucidation of the explanatory role of our concepts of intention, motive and reason. Melden’s famous example concerns a man who raises his arm. To the question, “Why did he raise his arm?” the answer “In raising his arm, he intended to signal” serves to re-characterise a performance first described as the driver’s raising his arm as an act of signalling. ‘Raising his arm’ and ‘signalling’ are different descriptions, each with different “implication threads” (to borrow an expression from Ryle (1971)). Although there may be any number of (muscular, physiological, neuronal) events leading up to and forming part of a causal chain resulting in the arm’s rising there is no reason to characterise (or identify) any of these events as the motive, intention, will, or reason to raise the arm. Such a characterisation in any case would not permit the redescription of the arm’s rising as either the driver’s raising his arm or as the act of signalling without adverting to the very background circumstances that I am here trying to show may be sufficient for such a redescription, and thus for a non-causal, context-placing explanation. Wittgenstein thought that we tend to be misled into thinking that there must be such an event—even if hidden from view— because we are focussing on one way that language functions to the exclusion of others. The concepts in question do indeed allow us to speak, for instance, of a person who comes to a decision, forms an intention, or admits that such and such reasons for acting are overriding. These uses encourage the thought that having an intention or reasons results from having formed an intention or from having considered and accepted the reasons and these in turn are construed, reasonably enough, as mental events. Now it is true that a full elucidation of the concept of intention and of reason and its cognates would have to include these uses. See Anscombe 1957 for such an elucidation; see Tanney 2002 for my own attempt. The formation of an intention or the consideration and acceptance of reasons might also figure in a causal explanation of an action. Anscombe 1983 gives an example of such a story. She imagines a case in which she has a long-standing resolution never to grant interviews with members of the media. When someone asks why she refused to see the representative of Time magazine, he is told of this long-standing resolution, which “makes her reject such approaches without thinking about the particular case.” This explanation, involving the expression ‘makes her…’ is causal, says Anscombe, in the sense that it derives the action from a previous state. Or, to borrow an example of Rogers Albritton, my recognition of someone’s character, for example, might cause me to break off relations with him. But, warns Anscombe, [i]t is one thing to say that a distinct and identifiable state of a human being, namely his having a certain intention, may cause various things to happen, even including the doing of what the intention was an intention to do; and quite another to say that for an action to be done in fulfilment of a certain intention (which existed before the action) is eo ipso for it to be caused by that prior intention. In other words, an event (say) in an agent’s history that can legitimately be classed as mental (e.g., his having made the decision, in the light of various factors, that he must do such-and-such) may feed into a causal story of a subsequent action that is performed in execution of that intention. But it should not be inferred from this that what it is to act in execution of that intention is a matter of there being some causal relation between this event and the action. One unhappy consequence of making this inference would be the supposition that there must have been such an event—possibly hidden or non-conscious—even when there is no obvious, conscious candidate. The following closely related idea may be useful in helping to understand this point. It may be that in some particular performance that counts as following a rule, a person consults an expression of that rule and then acts as it mandates. But it should not be inferred from this that what it is to follow a rule is a matter of there being some (overt or hidden) consultation of a rule. I discuss this further in my 2000 and 2008a. But it would be a mistake to form a general picture of the nature of intention or reason from this use alone, and require that every time we ascribe these concepts, there must have been a moment when the intention was formed or the reasons considered. Davidson argues for the former in his account of intention (1978); In Davidson’s Actions, Reasons, and Causes, acting for a reason consists merely in having a belief and pro-attitude with the right sort of content, which cause the action. Davidson responds to Melden’s challenge to find the mental event that constitutes the reason (understood thus) by declaring: Of course there was a mental event; at some point the driver noticed (or thought he noticed) his turn coming up, and that is the moment he signalled.… To dignify a driver’s awareness that his turn has come by calling it an experience, or even a feeling, is no doubt exaggerated, but whether it deserves a name or not, it had better be the reason why he raises his arm. (1963, 12-13) Thus the idea that the relevant concept’s function is to designate some kind of mental event is in place early in Davidson’s work. Incidentally, the driver’s noticing his turn coming up would (at best) be a reason why he chose that moment to signal. those working in the spirit of Davidson today have argued for the latter. Consider David Velleman: In order to have acted autonomously, the agent would need to have been actuated not only by the desire and belief mentioned in the story but also by the story itself, serving as his grasp of what he was doing – or, in other words, as his rationale. He would need, first, to have been inhibited from acting on his desire and belief until he knew what he was up to; and then guided to act on them once he had adopted this story. He would then have acted autonomously because he would have acted for a reason having been actuated in part by a rationale. (2000, 28) Michael Bratman’s (2001) claim that (full-blown) actions are caused by higher-order reflexive policies is similar to Velleman’s. We have seen that a rather different way of understanding the explanatory power of the response “He intended to signal” is by the placement of the performance first described as the man’s raising his arm in the wider circumstances of his driving a car and being about to make a turn. The response will succeed in explaining the man’s raising his arm, however, only to the extent that a description that puts it into this context is more understandable than a description that leaves this context out. If the one who is puzzled does not understand our driving practices or why anyone who is driving and approaching a turn should signal, then this re-characterisation of the action will not satisfy her. Now Davidson acknowledges that a logico-grammatical relation is in place between the contents of the relevant attitudes (the belief and pro-attitude which, for him, constitute the agent’s reason) and the action-type that it recommends. He also holds—what I am here calling into question—that attitude or reason-ascriptions function by designating events (or standing states and triggering events). His (positive) argument for construing this relation as causal is that the logico-grammatical relation exhibited in the content-description is an “anaemic” justificatory one: insufficient for accommodating the case in which the agent has a reason for acting in a certain way, acts in that way, but not because of that reason. For example, even though the driver had reason to signal—he was approaching his turn—he may have raised his arm for another reason—say, to wave to his friend. If so, then the re-characterisation of his action as a case of signalling will fail to explain the action. Davidson (1963, 11) presumably had this sort of case in mind as a counterexample to Melden. I have suggested elsewhere (Tanney 1995) that what Davidson is really after is “causal cement” for what he takes to be a logical gap between reasons and actions. (I have also suggested that his adherence to a Hempelian nomological-deductive model of explanations looms large in the background here.) On the view I am recommending this logical gap must not be closed. Reason does not determine, or provide a sufficient condition for, the action that it explains. Nor does a performance guarantee that a rationalising, reason explanation is on offer. The relation between reason and action is more the relation between warrants and moves than the “determinate connection” suggested in the causal, nomological-deductive account. But the fact that a context may be imagined in which the redescription fails to explain the action presents no threat to the argument. For it is no part of Melden’s job to insist that every context-placing redescription will succeed. Melden need only argue that when such an explanation does succeed (because it enables the one who is puzzled to see the action in a new, sense-making light) it may be the kind of context-placing explanation just described; one that does not depend upon or cannot be understood as requiring the existence of mental events—let alone (in principle describable) logically independent ones—that are alleged to constitute the reason or intention. And, although it is true that the redescription would not succeed unless the requisite motives, intentions, beliefs and desires could also be ascribed, there is no obligation to construe the deployment of these related concepts as the identification of events or standing states; let alone (in principle describable) logically independent ones. When context-placing explanations such as these are unsuccessful we may need to probe further for a different or more far-reaching context-placing explanation that will succeed or possibly give up the initial expectation that the action can be explained by reasons—but not assume that having reasons, intentions, and motives must be a matter of the instantiation of properties which may be in some sense hidden (e.g., tokenings of conscious or non-conscious mental events or of their alleged realisers). See my 1995 and 2005a for extended arguments for these claims. The problem in assuming that the motive, intention, or reason is (in principle describable as) a logically independent, temporally antecedent, causally efficacious event (perhaps identified with its alleged “onset”) is that it mis-assigns the explanatory function of these concepts. The position commits us to postulating an event, unobservable to others and possibly even to the agent herself that would, if known, provide the sought-after reason explanation for the agent’s action. In such cases, as Ryle insisted, an epistemological puzzle arises how anyone could ever know whether a person acts for reasons or what, if she does, her reasons are, since the hypothesis is not even in principle testable. Not only do we not, in everyday situations, have access to these hidden events, but even if we were, say, to monitor the neural activity of someone’s brain or access their stream of consciousness, we would never be able to set up the kinds of correlations that would establish a particular occurrence as an instance of a particular reason without already having a way of deciding whether someone acted for a particular reason in order to make the correlation. The foregoing considerations suggest that mental concepts such as intention, reason, and motive operate very differently from causal concepts— say, that of a gene. We might say that T.H. Morgan’s concept of a gene was the concept of something whose nature was to be discovered, responsible for the transmission of heritable characteristics. The DNA molecule, it was later found, plays that role. But the argument of this paper is that the concepts of intention, reason, etc. are not like this, for they discharge their explanatory role without designating anything; let alone causally efficacious states or events; let alone causally efficacious states or events whose nature awaits discovery. See Fodor 1968 and Putnam 1968 for early attempts to argue that mental concept should be construed by analogy with the concept of a gene. III. This, I think, is the correct way to understand the arguments of Wittgenstein, Melden, Anscombe, and Ryle. But it is difficult to know how to place this view within the contemporary debate in the philosophy of mind because it so rarely makes an appearance in today’s discussions. A student in philosophy of mind today might ask, for example, if this makes the view about intentions realist or irrealist, instrumentalist or behaviourist. In order to facilitate my aim of re-introducing Wittgensteinian territory into the contemporary landscape, it will be worthwhile taking a brief look at the temptation to plot this position with a particular metaphysical compass and suggest a reason why this temptation should be resisted. We were introduced to instrumentalism in the early work of Daniel Dennett. In “Intentional Systems” (Dennett, 1978) he describes the intentional stance by considering a chess-playing computer. In taking the intentional stance toward this machine, one is instrumentalist about propositional attitudes insofar as “we find it convenient, explanatory, [and] pragmatically necessary for prediction, to treat it as if it had beliefs and desires and was rational.” The discussion up until now has concerned intentions, reasons, and motives whereas this paragraph introduces beliefs (and propositional attitudes in general). This is not the place to defend or elucidate the idea that the relation between these concepts and the concepts of reason, intention, and action is a (logico-)grammatical one, but see my 2005a for one such discussion and the last chapters of Melden, 1961 for a different discussion of how the concepts of agency, want, and belief are thus connected. A machine for playing chess, however, is not like a man or animal: “its ‘rationality’ is pinched and artificial” (1978, 8). This was Dennett’s position in the 1970s. A decade or so later, his position seemed to change: [A]ll there is to being a true believer is being a system whose behaviour is reliably predictable via the intentional strategy, and hence all there is to really and truly believing that p (for any proposition p) is being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the best (most predictive) interpretation. (1987, 29) These two characterisations are, on the face of it, inconsistent. On the first, there really is something to being a believer over and above being predictable by the intentional stance and on the second there is nothing to being a believer than being thus predictable. On the first characterisation there seems to be an implicit acceptance that mental terms like ‘believes’ pick out underlying, possibly causally efficacious states or events. According to this picture, there is a difference between low-grade computers and people: people really have the underlying states (etc.) to which mental terms purport to refer. Instrumentalism on this construal is like an “error theory” in Mackie’s sense. Just as, for Mackie, moral terms purport to pick out moral facts, but do not really (and nonetheless serve their jobs) so do mental terms purport to pick out inner states, but sometimes do not really (and nonetheless serve their jobs). On the second characterisation, however, there may be no implied commitment to such underlying states in our use of mental expressions (on the contrary—this seems to be denied by the locution “all there is to being a believer...”). If there is no such commitment, this view would not be instrumentalist, since there would be nothing real to contrast with what is supposed to be instrumental. Is the second position a form of realism then? According to Devitt and Sterelny (1999, 293) Dennett’s later view is a form of “philosophical behaviourism”. Although usually construed as a type of fictionalism or instrumentalism about the mental, philosophical behaviourism is understood by them, in the context of discussing Dennett, as the realist doctrine that mental terms refer to (real) patterns of behaviour. But however appropriate or not this might be as a description of Dennett’s later position, it would not be a fair description of the view I have characterised as Wittgensteinian. On this latter view, to ascribe an intention, motive, or reason for some particular action may not involve an attempt to refer to anything; the concepts may function rather to explain an action by placing it in a context that renders it less puzzling. Note that to say that the concepts’ function is to explain in the way described above is very different from saying that the concepts discharge their role by designating a state, relation, or process which is to be identified by its functional/causal-explanatory role. Nor, for similar reasons, would it be a fair to characterise Ryle’s view in The Concept of Mind as a form of philosophical behaviourism even though he is widely (and misleadingly) credited with introducing us to this doctrine. I argue for this in more detail in Tanney 2005b and 2007. Ryle’s dispositions play the same role as the “sense-making pattern” or the “wider circumstances” play in the view I have just described. Ryle agrees with his interlocutor that when we use mental concepts to describe a performance, we are not merely taking into account “muscular behaviour”, because the same muscular behaviour in other circumstances could not be so described. A remark by a parrot, for example, could not be described as intelligent or witty. But it does not follow that in order to be credited with wit or intelligence the muscular behaviour must be accompanied by some mental act. In judging that a particular performance is intelligent, it is true that we look beyond the performance itself; but not into some “hidden counterpart” performance, taking place behind the scenes. We are considering, according to Ryle, the abilities and propensities of which this particular performance was an actualisation. “Our inquiry is not into causes (and a fortiori not into occult causes), but into capacities, skills, habits, liabilities and bents” (1949, 45). For Ryle, many of our “mental-conduct” verbs are correctly applied to a performance or an action because it is the actualisation of a disposition. But talk of dispositions complicates the matter. According to Ryle, the particular mental conduct terms whose logical geography he was attempting to map discharge their explanatory role by helping to situate the agent and her actions within a pattern that can be articulated by an infinitely long series of hypothetical (and mongrel-categorical) statements about what she could be expected to do, think, feel, etc., given her background (e.g., training) and the present circumstances. This is what he means in this context by noting that mental-conduct verbs are applied to performances that are actualisations of a disposition. But the introduction of dispositions will, for others, take us right back to the realm of hidden, underlying causes. See Mumford 1998 who argues for a particular (functionalist) version of realism about dispositions. Quine, for example, was dissatisfied with dispositional statements because they, like general causal statements, depend upon an intuitive or unanalysed notion of similarity or kind. Dispositional statements, best understood as subjunctive conditionals, are not amenable to paraphrase in the canonical (extensional) language in which Quine held that all serious scientific statements could be expressed. Quine’s claim that a serious scientific theory must be expressed in an extensional language bodes ill not only for unreconstructed dispositional statements but also, notoriously, for content and meaning in general. Quine suggested that when the disposition is of theoretical interest, then a mature science can dispose of this intuitive similarity notion by finding the underlying structure that will tell a more straightforward story in a way that renders the dispositional one obsolete. “Sometime, whether in terms of proteins or colloids or nerve nets or overt behaviour, the relevant branch of science may reach the stage where a similarity notion can be constructed capable of making even the notion of intelligence respectable. And superfluous” (1977, 174). Attraction to some of the aspects of Quine’s programme may be among the reasons scientific realists look deeper than observable patterns of dispositions and search for a common underlying structure in the kinds of things that manifest those patterns. In certain cases, this may be essential: if the dispositional concept is a theoretical concept it arguably needs the discovery of a “realiser” to vindicate it (as the discovery of the DNA molecule presumably was needed to vindicate the concept of gene). But it is precisely this way of construing mental concepts that is under dispute. When Ryle spoke of the “higher-grade” dispositions of people as “multi-track dispositions the exercise of which are indefinitely heterogeneous,” and when he used the example of Jane Austen’s representation of pride “in the actions, words, thoughts and feelings of her heroine in a thousand different situations” (1949, 44), he was reminding us of the patterns of conduct with which we are already familiar: indeed, he insisted that “the concepts of learning, practice, trying, heeding, pretending, wanting, pondering, arguing, shirking, watching, seeing and being perturbed are not technical concepts” (1949, 319). It was not part of his project (any more than Jane Austen’s) to speculate about the underlying structure of the “systems” or of people who exercised these dispositions. Nor did he think that such a scientific project could vindicate—let alone in principle replace—the everyday attributions effected by ordinary mental terms. IV. One used to hear the complaint made by philosophers impressed by Wittgenstein’s teaching that those who tried to treat mental terms as theoretical posits were guilty of changing the subject. This charge was rarely elaborated, and so it was dismissed on the grounds that it struck the opposition as sheer philistinism or brute prejudice against science. Now, this charge would sound philistine to those who have already accepted that psychology provides the science behind the ordinary use of mental concepts (together, perhaps, with an attraction to aspects of Quine’s programme). See, for example, Rey, 1997. But precisely these assumptions are denied by Wittgenstein and his followers by their insistence on distinguishing between different kinds of explanation. According to them, to ignore what is sense-making and observable in preference to what is underlying and whose nature awaits discovery is to misinterpret or ignore the role mental concepts play in our interpretive practices: to focus on underlying structures would force a change of subject by ignoring the way mental concepts normally discharge their role. The injunction, for example, to accept the observational-dispositional nature of mental terms for everyday use but to insist that their explanatory role depends on how well they interpret states within the system’s underlying structure does not make sense on the view I am recommending. This is because the explanatory function of reason concepts may be fully discharged by the placement of the action to be explained within the appropriate circumstances or wider context, or, as Anscombe suggests, so that a certain sense of the question “Why?” is given application. For philosophers such as Melden, Anscombe, and Ryle what it is to describe an action as one performed for such-and-such reasons or with such-and-such intention may simply involve an attempt to re-describe what in the context was puzzling with what in the new context is no longer puzzling. Insofar as the causal hypothesis forces us to construe the reason- or intention-ascription as functioning to designate an event, property, state, fact, or condition of a person the mysterious nature of which is open to investigation, it mis-assigns the concepts’ explanatory role. Compare: How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviourism arise?—The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them—we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)—And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don’t want to deny them. (Wittgenstein, 1953, §308) In any case, the complaint of prejudice can be turned around against those who suppose that the role of truly explanatory concepts must be capturable in a language suitable for the aims of mathematics and logic. Quine, for his part, suggests that ‘amiable’ and ‘reprehensible’ are disposition terms that should draw on intuitive kinds. Why not suppose with the Wittgensteinians that mental conduct terms are like those? The Quinean motivation for reducing dispositions to underlying structures is dubious in any case. Even if they could be accommodated by logical and mathematical methods, these methods themselves would have to rely on intuitive notions of similarity: this is, after all, the lesson of Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules. See Wittgenstein, 1953, §§143-155 and §185ff. For an admirable discussion of this point, see Dilman (1978/9, 35-58). I have argued that it may be the familiarity, unsurprisingness, or sense-making aspect of the context, pattern, or circumstances that perform the function of explaining the action and it is this pattern that is illuminated when the content of the reason, motive or intention is ascribed. This “sense-making” criterion is closely related to, but sometimes conflicts with, another criterion we use for ascribing intentions, motives, and reasons: namely, that which the subject herself says or would say about her reasons (etc.) for acting. This may involve either a pronouncement on her motives, intentions, or reasons construed as her own way of making sense of her action, or as a (memory) report of events that may be accompanying or have preceded the action (e.g. a sudden decision or realization), or both. A fuller treatment of this will have to wait another time; a few brief (and no doubt provocative words) will have to do. Suppose we have recourse to ask Melden’s driver what he was doing: was he signalling or waving to a friend? Sometimes his answer will satisfy us; sometimes it will not. But in answering us, he, too, is attempting to place his action within a sense-making context, for according to the view I am attempting to reintroduce, he will have mastered the relevant concepts—acquired the various skills— in the same way as everyone else. What if his answer does not make sense of his action? We have a choice. We may accept his answer because in asking for his reasons for acting, we may be seeking (on this occasion) his own conception of what he is or was doing, whether or not it satisfies us. When our way of making sense of him conflicts with his understanding of himself, or with his memory reports of what he was thinking at the time, we may reject his answer as inadequate. That is to say, this second (“self-conception”) way of understanding the expression “his reason for acting” may be set aside in favour of the other (“sense-making”) one. After all, what a person has to say is not always authoritative: as Anscombe reminds us, there are controls on someone’s proffered reasons, motives, or intentions. Anscombe, 1957, §25. Nonetheless, there may come a point when these controls have been exhausted: there is nothing occurring either before or after the action to check on an agent’s truthfulness, sincerity, or lack of self-deception in declaring her reasons for acting. Where there is nothing in the circumstances either before or after the action to enable us to pinpoint her reason any better than she has been able to do, then perhaps we reach a point, says Anscombe (“after much dispute and fine diagnosis of her genuineness”), when only the agent can say why she acts as she does. But this is not, as the traditional Cartesian would have it, because she has access to an intention, motive, or reason—now conceived as something interior— that is forever hidden from anyone else, but rather because no one else has any grounds for correcting her. As I shall put it on behalf of Wittgenstein, what the agent says is, in such (unusual) circumstances, the only criterion available—the only sense that can be given—to “her reasons for acting.” The arguments of this paper are intended to support the idea that the explanatory role of mental concepts is different from that supposed in contemporary philosophy of mind. The crux of the debate centres not only on whether mental concepts can be assimilated to theoretical terms: I have suggested that a full treatment of the Wittgensteinian position would involve denying that the predicative expressions in which mental concepts figure must involve the very notion of a reference or an extension that is at the root of the Carnap-Quine-Davidson programme. The arguments I put forward here call into question the idea that mental terms purport to function in the general case as referring expressions: i.e., that their primary use or the way by which they discharge their explanatory role is to designate or name an event, state, object, property, or relation. See Ryle 1971 for his explorations on this theme. A number of moves made in metaphysics, epistemology, and in philosophy of language and mind in the 60s and 70s—ones that are presupposed in most of the work in these fields today—would be thrown into question as well if this idea is correct. If they are not referring expressions, then the construal of them by scientific realists on the analogy with natural kind terms such as ‘gold’ or ‘tiger’—whose essence is a matter for science to discover—is a non-starter. This is, for example, the treatment that (early) Putnam (1968, 1-19) suggests for the concept of pain. The diagnosis would also cast doubt on Armstrong’s (1980, 16-17) characterisation of conceptual elucidation and ontology as the investigation of second- and first-order questions, respectively. So too, of course, would it help to define the real trouble with functionalism. The functionalists (and conceptual-role theorists) were right to focus on the importance of function, role, or use. But the explanatory role is played, I have argued, by the way the concept is wielded in re-describing the behaviour of a system. It is not played by referring (however obliquely) to the system’s internal (first- or second-order) states. And finally the view that ‘criteriological’ investigations modelled after Wittgenstein’s are about justification and therefore about epistemology and not metaphysics would founder as well. See the preface to Shoemaker 1984 for a biographical account of how his acceptance of this distinction led him to abandon criteriological investigations for causal accounts. If I am right, then it would seem that a natural way of conceiving the dispute between mental realists and irrealists is based upon a category mistake from the outset. An ancestor of this paper was presented in January 2004 to the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST) in Paris for a workshop on commonsense psychology. Thanks to Sandra Laugier, Daniel Andler, Pierre Henri Castel, Ruwen Ogien, Jean-Jacques Rosat, for helpful discussion and to John Flower, Edward Harcourt, and Richard Norman for their comments. A recent version was presented in 2007 as a Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture at the University of Keele. Thanks to Sorin Baiasu, Geraldine Coggins, Giuseppina d’Oro, and James Tartaglia for their penetrating questions which have helped improve the text and to Constantine Sandis for suggestions that have helped me clarify the argument. References Anscombe, E. 1957. Intention, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. — 1983. “The Causation of Action”, in Knowledge and Mind: Philosophical Essays, Ginet and Shoemaker (eds), Oxford University Press, New York, 174-90. Armstrong, D. 1980. The Nature of Mind, University of Queensland Press, Queensland. Block, Ned 1978. ‘Troubles with Functionalism’ reprinted in Block, 1980. — 1980. Readings in Philosophy of Psychology vol. 1, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Bratman, M. 2001. “Two Problems about Human Agency”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 101, issue 3, 309-26. Crane, T. 2004. 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Final published in New Essays on the Explanation of Action, edited by Constantine Sandis, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).