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Question Session 04

 

Week 04 Questions:

Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science

this is being recorded

Steve

Was there anything you noticed in the essays that you want to mention here?

habitual action

habitual process

‘a habitual--goal-directed spectrum’

Keramati, Smittenaar, Dolan, & Dayan (2016)

Steve

Can you offer a conclusion to Part I?

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

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

two perspectives

What distinguishes your actions from things that merely happen to you? (‘The Problem of Action’)

It seems reasonable to expect that any framework that supports theorising about action in the behavioural and social sciences must say something about The Problem of Action. So while solving this problem is not sufficient for our aims, doing so might seem to be necessary. Also a focus for philosophy of action.

Standard Solution: actions are those events which stand in an appropriate causal relation to an intention.

Alternative Solution: actions are those events which stand in an appropriate causal relation to a motor representation.

Observation: the Alternative Solution is not obviously in any way worse than the Standard Solution.
This brings me to a second objection ...

Objection 1

habitual processes

Some actions run counter to any of the agent’s intentions because they are dominated by habitual processes.

Objection 2

motor processes

Invoking motor representations yields a solution to the problem of action that is no worse than the Standard Solution.

rejecting the standard solution is Just The Beginning

Just The Beginning

Which events are actions? In philosophy, answering this question would typically answered by appeal to intention or practical reasoning.
Such views tend to be neutral on how the attitudes and processes ultimately connect to bodily movements; that is considered to be merely an implementation detail ...
They are neutral in this sense: the views do not depend in any way on facts about that distinguish one kind of body from another, or on facts about how the body’s movements are ultimately controlled ...
In cognitive science ... little to say about actions whose purposes involve things the motor system doesn’t care about---your motor system doesn’t care whether the plane you are stepping is headed for Milan or for Rome, but this sort of difference can affect whether your actions succeed or fail.
You might just say that the two disciplines are talking past each other, or you might say that they are offering two complementary but independent models of action.
Call this the ‘Two Stories View’ (or divorced, but living together).
[Alt: quick version --- Ask a phil about action and they'll tell you a story about intentions and processes of practical reasoning. Ask a psych ... Do we need to connect these largely separate stories or is it fine for each discipline to tell its own story about action? Let's see ...]
I think there’s a problem. If you ask scientists about action, they will tell you a story about motor representations and processes. And if you ask philosophers, they will tell you a story about intentions and practical reasoning.
Both stories seem reasonably compelling, and there is even evidence for one of them.
How are the two stories related? One possibility is that they are two ways of talking about a single thing.
But this doesn't seem right because the stories explain different, if overlapping, phenomena. The philosophers are interested in everything from extremely large scale actions which may take days, like the action of competing in the Tour de France to very small scale actions such as the action of turning a crank.
The psychologists, by contrast, are mostly interested in the small and very small scale actions. So there is some overlap in actions like turning a crank, breaking an egg, taking and eating a biscuit.
How are the two stories related if they are not using different words for the same thing? Another possibility is that they are just completely unconnected. One is about the ‘space of reasons’, another about the space of something else.
But this possibility is hard to square with the idea that intentions are causal elements in processes which, often enough, result in the body moving. It seems that the practical reasoning has to influence the motor processes, and perhaps conversely too. As Elisabeth suggested in a ground-breaking ‘dynamic theory of intentions’ (Pacherie, 2008, p. 181ff.), it is plausible that motor representations can inherit goals from, and be influenced by, intentions (pp. 186--7).
Just here we face a practical problem. Because of the separation of concerns, there very little research on how the two stories---the one about intentions and practical reasoning, and the one about motor representations and processes---might join up.
So it is that the interface problem falls into the gap between philosophers’ concerns with practical reasoning and scientists’ concerns with motor control. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

compatible stories about different things?

contradictory stories about one thing?

aspects of a single larger story?

habitual processes, motivation, affect, reasons, knowledge, experience, autonomy, control, attention, agency ...?

We did just scratch the surface.

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

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

two perspectives

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

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

two perspectives

more questions?