The Problem of Action meets Habitual Processes

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The Problem of Action meets Habitual Processes

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

Why focus on this problem? Step back---what do we want from a philosophical story about action?

I suppose we want a framework that supports theorising about action in the behavioural and social sciences. Minimally, the framework should allow us to make all the important distinctions; enable us to formulate questions about how and why agents act; and support deriving predictions from hypotheses about the answers to these questions. That, at least, is the framework we (well, mainly you) are attempting to construct in thinking through philosophical issues in behavioural sciences.

It seems reasonable to expect that any such framework must solve The Problem of Action. So while solving this problem is not sufficient for our aims, doing so does seem to be necessary.

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

Objection: some instrumental actions manifestly run counter to the agents’ intentions.

Why is this an objection?

Has been the source of much discussion ...

How do we know? From persistence following devaluation!

[ensure term is in glossary on the handout page: extinction]

Schwabe & Wolf (2010, p. figure 6)

Key is that these subjects did not frequently desire chocolate pudding. You can see this in the control group.

We cannot say there was no desire at all, but at least satiety produced a significantly reduced desire (as you’d expect). (Possible that some of the residual responding was habitual and therefore that the desire is even more reduced that the behaviour suggests.)

And this change in desire would have been the same for the stressed group, except it had no effect on their behaivour.

So their desires for the food are not influential. Therefore neither are their intentions to eat the food.

Sometimes your instrumental actions manifestly run counter to your intentions.

another example—new study (popcorn)

Neal, Wood, Wu, & Kurlander (2011)

one new example ...

‘in a study conducted in a local cinema, participants with stronger habits to eat popcorn at the movies consumed more than those with weak habits, even when they disliked the popcorn because it was stale and unpalatable (Neal et al., 2011).’ p.right.grey-text (Wood & Rünger, 2016, p. 293)

Sometimes your instrumental actions manifestly run counter to your intentions.

(this is also a key response to zahidnasser’s question)

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

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

‘deviant causal chains’ (Davidson, 1980, pp. 78--9)

Davidson’s original example (many elaborations have been offered, see Shepherd (2021, pp. 30--1) mentions three more): ‘A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his hold, and yet it might be the case that he never chose to loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally.’ (Davidson, 1980, p. 79)

Minimally, the action should not manifestly run counter to the intention;and neither should whether the action occurs be independent of what the agent intends.

Objection: some instrumental actions manifestly run counter to the agents’ intentions.

Why is this an objection?

How do we know? From persistence following devaluation!

aside: you can also make this argument using AHS

the movements are actions, that is what is so distrubing about them (it’s not like parkinson’s, which involves an entirely different kind of loss of control)

(Della Sala, Marchetti, & Spinnler, 1991)

response 1

insist there’s an intention
(see zahidnasser’s objection)

What do you have to assume about intentions to avoid the objection and make the case align with the Standard Soultion?

Neal et al. (2011)

option (i) - the intention to eat the stale popcorn is more common in ‘high habit’ group ... but only in the cinema

Seems quite a silly suggestion.

‘strong-habit participants experienced the shift in motivation as a function of the food’s freshness. They rated the fresh popcorn as more likable than the stale, and thus they did not value the popcorn more than those with weak habits. [...]

‘Furthermore, tests of whether the habit effects depended on liking for the popcorn or current hunger revealed that these factors did not moderate the effects of habit strength on eating.’

(Neal et al., 2011, p. 1432)

option (ii) - there are other intentions, perhaps intentions to empty the bag, or intentions to grasp and place

Why think this? Seems like a move of desperation.

To be clear, the Objection cannot demonstrate that the Standard Solution is false. It just makes it seem implausible.

(From here, could go on to do the circularity thing: intentions are states that ditsinguish actions from things that merely happen to you; actions are distinguishes from events that merely happen to you by events.)

To illustrate, let’s look at one way of making this concrete: interpose an intention in the story ...

old: stimulus–action + stimulus → action

new: stimulus–action + stimulus → intention → action

You can do this, but there are costs. (1) The intention looks redundant, so it will be hard to justify. (2) the intention appears to float free of any belief or desire (this is the whole point of the popcorn example).

But this idea—that we say which things actions are by invoking intention—seems interesting if we have an independent grip on actions, and on intentions. Then it seems like a potentially bold and interesting thesis which might have implications beyond psychology for ethics and social cognition.

It’s a lot less interesting if intentions are just whatever causes actions.

option (iii) - intentions are in the background ...

Let me explore this a bit more deeply

DanielKnoth [2022–23]

Can the standard answer maybe incorporate habitual processes and defend the relationship between intention and action by arguing that when the habit was originally formed, there existed some kind of intention and the more or less automatic process of habitual actions, later on, is still linked to that original intention?

motivational potential (Bratman, 1984)

Desiring to repeat the high from a daily exercise routine,

and using what she knows from studying animal learning,

Ayesha sets a novel and unique alarm sound,

exercises immediately on hearing this alarm,

and treats herself immediately after exercising.

(Better living through cognitive science.)

Of course, the more common scenario is that one person intentional exploits habitual processes in another person. (tiktok & whatever).

But you can do it to yourself.

[links to hespercheung’s ‘basketball’ objection]

BUT:

not all stimulus–action links are a consequence of intention!

We will understand this better when we have considered motor control. But for now just know that the world presents us with affordances and in this way can pull actions out of us.

Neal et al. (2011)

option (i) - the intention to eat the stale popcorn is more common in ‘high habit’ group

option (ii) - there are other intentions, perhaps intentions to empty the bag, or intentions to grasp and place

old: stimulus–action + stimulus → action

new: stimulus–action + stimulus → intention → action

option (iii) - intentions are in the background

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

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

‘deviant causal chains’ (Davidson, 1980, pp. 78--9)

Minimally, the action should not manifestly run counter to the intention;and neither should whether the action occurs be independent of what the agent intends.

Objection: some instrumental actions manifestly run counter to the agents’ intentions.

Why is this an objection?

How do we know? From persistence following devaluation!

response 2

deny instrumental actions are all actions

Issue: this cannot be arbitrary. you need some grounds for the denial.

What the Standard Solution requires is that intentions guide actions.

What the dual-process theory of instrumental action entails is that intentions can sometimes fail to guide instrumental actions.

It would not be a good response to insist that those instrumental actions cannot really be actions because intentions do not guide them. (That would seem to make the Standard Solution immune to any kind of objection at all.) You need grounds for saying this that do not presuppose the truth of the Standard Solution.

‘Among the things I did were

get up,

wash,

shave,

go downstairs, and

spill my coffee.’

(Davidson, 1971, p. 43)

Couldn’t any of these be consequences of habitual processes?

‘Among the things that happened to me were

being awakened and

stumbling on the edge of the rug.’

(Davidson, 1971, p. 43)

eating popcorn

pressing a button to watch a film clip

In conclusion, I will not say that the objection is decisive.

But I if you want to defend the Standard Solution, I think the objection provides a substantial challenge.

Further, if you were not particularly attached to the Standard Solution, then I think the objection provides sufficient reason to reject it.

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

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

‘deviant causal chains’ (Davidson, 1980, pp. 78--9)

Minimally, the action should not manifestly run counter to the intention;and neither should whether the action occurs be independent of what the agent intends.

Objection: some instrumental actions manifestly run counter to the agents’ intentions.

Why is this an objection?

How do we know? From persistence following devaluation!

challenge

Discover why people act,
individually and jointly.

This leaves us with a problem.

The challenge for the whole course is to discover why people act, individually and jointly

To make this theoretically feasible, we want a shared understand of which things we are aiming to theorize about (it cannot be about movement generally because that would require physics rather than psychology, philosophy or economics).

The Standard Solution was our attempt to achieve that shared understanding. If we reject the Standard Solution, we reject the basis for our whole project.

But there is a compelling objection to the Standard Solution.

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The Problem of Action meets Habitual Processes

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