Neil Roughley

The last chapter of Part I discusses the relations between optative attitudinising, consciousness and affect. The explication of wanting* in terms of its linguistic expression suggests that conscious thoughts of the appropriate form are sufficient for their bearer to be the bearer of the corresponding attitude. I argue that this is indeed so, although no such thought is necessary for a want’s* correct ascription. Cases of what I call “subintentional action”, of an agent’s motivated inaccessibility to her own motivation as well as experimental evidence from goal priming all demonstrate the lack of any such necessity. Nevertheless, although features of the optative syndrome that we would otherwise be at a loss to explain can warrant the ascription of unconscious wants*, there can be no strict criteria for their correct ascription.Only with conscious wanting* do we have such a criterion. For this reason, it remains the phenomenon that allows us to get a conceptual grip on our optative attitudes. This is the case, even though agents may sometimes be mistaken as to whether they “really want” something, a mistake whose possibility depends on the fact that the latter phrase generally picks out wanting* in conjunction with further features. One such further feature that has frequently been seen as decisive for wanting in one way or another is that of pleasure or displeasure. The chapter closes with a survey of the various relationships between wanting* and affect. I offer arguments as to why, in spite of a long philosophical tradition to the contrary and its revival at the hands of Galen Strawson, none of these relationships qualify as constitutive of the generic concept a theory of wanting should be trying to reconstruct.

The seventh chapter details intention’s prominent non-doxastic accompaniments, dividing them into two groups: causal consequences of, and normative requirements applicable to intending. The causal features – motivational strength, pervasion of an agent’s mental life and persistence – may frequently be more pronounced than in cases of other wants*, but they are not specific enough to warrant postulating a distinct kind of mental state. The real challenge for the reductionist is posed by requirements of rationality to which intenders are unavoidably subject. The main burden of this chapter is the development and fine-tuning of explicit formulations of the relevant principles.Here, I discuss various moves in the recent debates on rationality, arguing for a view of the intention-consequential (IC) requirements that is largely wide-scope, although with certain restrictions. I also argue against Wedgewood’s and Broome’s claim that rationality necessarily supervenes on the mind. One reason why the supervenience thesis is false is that perhaps the most basic IC requirement concerns executive consistency, i.e., is a principle one of whose relata is not an attitude, but an action. I defend this claim both against the supervenience thesis and the assertion that any such requirement would be conceptual rather than rational. Specific formulations of standards for subordinate intending and for the eschewal of intention-undermining intentions are also proposed. The first involves a rejection of Broome’s restrictive assumption that the doxastic premise should concern the necessity of the agent’s own intending and its effects, rather than that of his performing a certain action. Although the second is close to a formulation of Bratman’s, I take issue with his explanation of the requirement in terms of agglomerativity, which I argue has a mere epistemic role. Finally, I also propose a formulation of a requirement of deliberative intention persistence, which specifies the doxastic conditions under which it is irrational not to uphold one’s intentions. These concern the relative deliberation-conduciveness of the conditions under which the intention was formed and those given at a later point in time. Significantly for an understanding of the structure of intention, this latter principle only applies to deliberative cases.

In the book’s first chapter, the topic of practical mind is approached via a brief survey of a number of important positions in the history of philosophy. The founding question for a philosophy of practical mind is raised by Aristotle when he asks what it is in the soul that originates movement. I discuss the answers to this question proposed by Plato, Aristotle himself, Hobbes and Hume, before rounding off the historical survey with a look at the introduction of the notion of “pro-attitude” in the last century. The key question put to the various proposals concerns their capacity to give a unitary account of what it is that “moves” agents. Put in terms of the last of the suggestions discussed: is there a single pro-component that unites the diverse ways of being for something under one genus? And if so, is that pro-component the feature that moves us?None of the positions surveyed provides adequate answers to these questions. Plato’s modular model of the soul turns out to presuppose the notion of a motivational state. The motivational conception of unity proposed by Hobbes depends on his crude materialist conflation of very different features of mental states. Hume’s hedonistic position runs into problems of coherence at the moment at which he attempts to explain how affect can be motivationally decisive. The twentieth-century notion of pro-attitudes is so formal as to provide no criterion for membership. The most demanding of the theories surveyed, Aristotle’s attempt to establish a criterion of motivational unity under the term “orexis”, also appears, in spite of his explicit aim to the contrary, to be no more than nominal. The relationship between the three forms of orexis, as well as the category’s relationship to both the emotions and to ‘prohairesis’, remain unclear. Here, as in Plato, the attempt to keep ethical and non-ethical motivation separate remains a serious stumbling block. Nevertheless, the introduction of “prohairesis”, that is, of a deliberatively transformed motivational state, is a groundbreaking move, which calls out for integration within a systematic motivational theory.

It is often claimed that humans are rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral creatures. What these characterizations may all have in common is the more fundamental claim that humans are normative animals, in the sense that they are creatures whose lives are structured at a fundamental level by their relationships to norms. The various capacities singled out by discussion of rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral animals might then all essentially involve an orientation to obligations, permissions and prohibitions. And, if this is so, then perhaps it is a basic susceptibility, or proclivity to normative or deontic regulation of thought and behavior that enables humans to develop the various specific features of their life form. This volume of new essays investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals in this sense. The contributors do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms-social, moral, and linguistic-and asking whether they might all be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind. These questions are posed by philosophers, primatologists, behavioral biologists, psychologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists, who have collaborated on this topic for many years. The contributors are committed to the idea that understanding normativity is a two-way process, involving a close interaction between conceptual clarification and empirical research.

The last three chapters of the book contain my systematic proposal as to how intentions can be reductively understood whilst accounting for the specificity of the intentional syndrome, in particular whilst allowing us to understand the force of the requirements of intention rationality. The proposal is disjunctive and genetic: I claim that intentions are optative attitudes on which a contextually unique practical status has been conferred, a status that can be conferred by one of two aetiological mechanisms.The first of those mechanisms is decision, the most salient form of intention acquisition. This chapter aims to clarify what it is about deciding that enables it to confer that status. I begin by looking at cases in which deciding goes beyond motivational and evaluative phenomena, cases for which decision theory leaves no room and which are metaphysically overdramatised by Existentialism. In order to get a handle on the feature at work in these cases, I compare the different ways judging and deciding depend on at least minimal forms of theoretical inquiry and practical deliberation respectively. The decisive difference concerns the relationship between the motivations for the relevant form of reflection: whereas it is an essential, internal feature of inquiry that it be powered by a want* which specifies the conditions under which some belief content can count as an answer to the question that inaugurated that inquisitive episode, no such criterial specification of the motivation internal to minimal deliberation can be given. Instead, all that is required here is that the answer to the question that inaugurated deliberation be the deliberator’s own answer. An extended discussion of conceptions of the strong ownership of attitudes (Frankfurt, Korsgaard, Velleman) and of the relationship between conclusives reasons judgements and decisions supports this conclusion. After rejecting the claim that decisions might be actions, I conclude with a constructive proposal, according to which a decision is a conscious optative occurrence seen by its bearer as his own answer to the optative uncertainty that triggered an episode of minimal deliberation and which for that reason causes him to desist from further deliberation on the matter.