Introduction: Why Investigate Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science?

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Introduction: Why Investigate Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science?

Questions (and structure) for this course:

[action] Which events in your life are your actions?

What is your contribution to the world?

[joint action] What distinguishes doing something jointly with another person from acting in parallel with them but merely side by side?

two perspectives

philosophical and scientific

How, if at all, do discoveries in behavioural sciences contribute to answering these questions?

why behavioural sciences?

philosophical
methods

informal observation,

guesswork (‘intuition’),

reasoning,

& theoretical elegance

First, think about the methods philosophers use. Am I missing any?

Next, think about how philosophers construct theories of action ...

Here’s Ayesha and she’s about to act, which involves some kind of processes occurring in her imnd.

Ben want’s to predict Ayesha’s action, perhaps so he can coordinate his actions around hers. He is therefore having a think about what Ayesha might be up to.

Implicit in Ben’s thinking is a model of actions.

And along comes the philosopher and attempts to guess what is going on in Ben’s mind when he is thinking about Ayesha. The philosopher asks, in effect, What model of actions is implicit in Ben’s thinking?

And this, essentially, is the raw material for philosophical theories of actions.

Focus on Ben for a moment.

What mundane purposes does thinking about actions serve? Prediction and coordination; ethical (assigning responsibility, blame; living together); normative (he wants himself and others to live it out as much as to describe how things are; there may also be something about ‘understanding’ here). So it’s not all about accuracy; in fact, of these, only prediction and coordination even potentially requires that his model of actions is accurate.

Functions of Ben’s model of minds and actions:

ethical
legal
normative
predictive
Second, consider Ben’s concern with making predictions.
--- speed vs accuracy
Whenever you are making predictions about anything at all, you face a **trade-off between accuracy and speed**. Making more accurate predictions requires considering more information and integrating it in a more complex model of minds and actions. By contrast, making faster predictions requires narrowing the information you consider and using a less complex model of minds and actions. Since Ben often has to make predictions fast enough to actually coordinate his actions with Ayesha’s, and since making predictions consumes scarce cognitive resources, Ben is usually needs to trade accuracy for speed.
So Ben’s model of minds and actions is not built for accuracy.

So this is the model of minds and actions on which many philosophical theories are based ... they are cast as attempts to characterise this model.

Relying on philosophers to characterise actions
would be like
relying on Aristotelians to characterise physical objects.

In the case of physical objects, I suppose few people seriously think there is much we can understand without appeal to physics.

As Newton stressed, contemporary philosophical methods are not well suited to the task. Contemporary philosophical methods are of limited use in making discoveries about the world.

why behavioural sciences?

There is a twist ... some of the best behavioural science actually tries to use the same broad approach as the philosophers.

In any case, these two questions are what we will consider.

Questions (and structure) for this course:

[action] Which events in your life are your actions?

What is your contribution to the world?

[joint action] What distinguishes doing something jointly with another person from acting in parallel with them but merely side by side?

And we’ll get started with the first question right away.

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Introduction: Why Investigate Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science?

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