The Possibility of Practical Reason, 2nd Edition

1  Introduction to the Second Edition[1]

Imagine that your arm becomes paralyzed but your doctors predict a return to normal function within a matter of days. When you wake up each morning, the first thing you do is to check whether you have regained control of your arm. What exactly are you hoping to find?

Part of what you’re hoping to find, no doubt, is that your arm moves. But movement by itself wouldn’t be enough. Waking up to find your arm flapping around aimlessly wouldn’t lead you to think that your control over it had been restored. You’d have to conclude instead that paralysis had given way to a spasm.

What you’re hoping to find, then, is that your arm not only moves but also moves when and where you want it to. Yet movement in response to your desires wouldn’t be enough, either. You might, of course, be encouraged if you found your hand scratching an itch behind your ear; but if you subsequently found it grabbing food off someone else’s plate, you wouldn’t necessarily be reassured by the reflection that you had indeed wanted what he was eating.

The problem in this case, we might be inclined to say, is that although you wanted the food on someone else’s plate, you also wanted to follow the rules of etiquette, and so grabbing the food wasn’t something you wanted to do on balance or overall. Your having control of your arm would require that the arm do, not just something that you wanted, but what you wanted most.

Yet how do you tell what you want most? If you have ever cast a speculative glance at the uneaten french fries on someone else’s plate, you’ll know that the contest between appetite and etiquette can be close. Surely, appetite might win out before you had realized that it was the stronger; indeed, you might realize that it was the stronger only by seeing that it had won out, as evidenced by the movement of your arm. And then the thought that this movement reflected the stronger of your motives would not convince you of your having regained control.

In each of these cases, I have indicated your lack of control by casting you in the role of a spectator, who “sees” or “finds” that his arm is moving. Many philosophers share the intuition that being a spectator is the diametrical opposite of being an agent. As Brian O'Shaughnessy puts it, “Common to all experiences of loss of agency is the sense of becoming a spectator of one’s own actions.”[2] In the words of another philosopher, “[I]t seems as though someone has moved into your body and pushed you off the playing field up into the grandstand to be a mere spectator of yourself.”[3] This trope is almost universal in the philosophical literature about action and the will.[4]

That this contrast seems so natural ought to seem odd. Why is doing so often contrasted with seeing? Why is the opposite of “participant” so often “observer” rather than “abstainer” or “absentee”? If our relation to things that are not our doing is the relation of an onlooker, what does that say about our relation to the things that we do?

This question is the starting point for one venerable line of thought in the philosophy of action: If the essence of passivity with respect to an event is witnessing it, then perhaps activity with respect to an event—which can hardly consist in blindness to it—consists rather in knowing about it in some other way. This line of thought inspired the work that many regard as having inaugurated the contemporary study of action: Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention.[5]

Anscombe argued that what is our doing in the fullest sense can be distinguished from mere happenings by virtue of being the object of a special kind of knowledge.[6] Anscombe called it “knowledge without observation,” and although I think that her attempts to define observation and its absence were not successful, I also think that what she had in mind is clear enough. It’s a kind of knowledge that is to some extent independent of prior evidence, and according to Anscombe, such knowledge is embodied in the mental state of intention.

Anscombe pointed out that expressions of intention, such as “I am going to take a walk,” are similar to predictions insofar as they are “indicative (descriptive, informatory).”[7] When all goes well, they express the speaker’s knowledge of what he is doing or will do, which is “known by the being the content of [his] intention.”[8] Anscombe thus conceived of intention as a potentially knowledge-bearing state, expressed in potentially knowledge-conveying utterances. What distinguishes the knowledge embodied in intention from other sorts of knowledge, she said, is that it is practical knowledge, in the sense that it causes—rather than being caused by, or causally concomitant to—the facts that make it true.[9] By “knowledge without observation,” then, Anscombe simply meant knowledge that is productive rather than receptive of what is known.

What I presume to call my theory of agency is in fact a variation on this theme of Anscombe’s. My main departure from Anscombe has been to introduce a story about the dynamics of practical knowledge, based on two premises that seem to me uncontroversial.

The first premise is that knowledge is not passively received in the manner imagined by some empiricists; it is the result of intellectual activity, which requires an intellectual motive. In my earliest statements of this premise,[10] I called the intellectual motive a desire to understand, but I eventually realized that the term ‘desire’ is inapposite, and so I replaced it with the term ‘drive’. To speak of a “desire to understand” something connotes a propositional attitude toward a representation of ourselves understanding it. We may have such an attitude on occasion, but it is not a standing motive of our intellectual activity in general. Our standing intellectual motive is a drive to escape the unease or anxiety of being baffled, perplexed, or bewildered—a nonpropositional urge that finds release in understanding but doesn’t represent it as an end in view. I still refer to this drive as giving us the aim of understanding, but its role as an aim consists in the fact that it discharges the urge to escape from perplexity.

My second premise is that a person is normally aware, from his own egocentric perspective, of being identical with an especially salient member of the objective order—identical, that is, with the creature walking in his shoes, sleeping in his bed, eating his meals, and so on. That creature is of great interest to a person, and its doings consequently become the object of the person’s intellectual motives. But the person’s awareness of being identical with that creature opens up an obvious shortcut to the cognitive goal. The subject can know what that creature is doing simply by doing what he conceives of the creature as doing, or about to do, because his conception will then turn out to be not only true but also justified, on the grounds of the creature’s having this very incentive to bear it out. A person’s conception of what he is doing has epistemic authority because he tends to behave in accordance with it; and he tends to behave in accordance with it so as to have, embodied in it, an epistemically authoritative conception of what he is doing. Practical knowledge thus supplants theoretical knowledge, as a more secure route to the same cognitive goal.[11]

As it turns out, the psychological basis of this story has been copiously documented by social psychologists working in the area that is sometimes labeled “self-consistency,” an area that encompasses the topics of cognitive dissonance and attribution.[12] Research in this area, widely replicated over the course of decades, has shown that people have a broad tendency to behave in ways that are consistent with their own conceptions of themselves, of how they behave in general, and of what their motives are on a particular occasion. People can be made to behave angrily by being convinced that they are angry—the more angrily, the more angry they are convinced of being. Children are more likely to be tidy if told that they are tidy than if told that they should be. Extremely shy people do not act shyly if led to believe that the symptoms of their social anxiety are attributable to something other than shyness.

One team of researchers observed that their subjects’ behavior can be influenced by the act-descriptions that they are antecedently primed to frame, as if they have a tendency to fulfill antecedently framed descriptions of their forthcoming actions. These researchers hypothesized that this tendency is the means by which people know what they are doing, and that it constitutes the mechanism of acting on an intention. Social psychology has thus arrived independently at a dynamic version of Anscombe’s thesis that intention embodies practical knowledge.

The same researchers claim to have shown, furthermore, that we ordinarily seek to identify our behavior at a “high” or “comprehensive” level representing our underlying motives and ultimate goals. They describe this tendency as a “search for meaning in action” or “a human inclination to be informed of what we are doing in the most integrative and general way available.”[13] Here the empirical findings harmonize with my dynamic version of Anscombe’s theory in a further respect. With a now famous example, Anscombe pointed out that an agent often knows what he is doing under a series of descriptions, each of which incorporates the answer to the question “Why?” directed at the same action under the previous description in the series. Why is he moving his arm? Because he is pumping water. Why is he pumping water? Because he is replenishing the water supply. Why is he replenishing the water supply? Because he is poisoning the inhabitants of the building. Why is he poisoning the inhabitants? Because he is assassinating enemy agents. With the exception of the first, purely physical description, all of the descriptions under which this person knows what he’s doing are answers to the question why he is doing it as previously described.[14]

The sequence from “moving his arm” to “killing enemy agents” displays a progression toward increasingly high-level or comprehensive act-descriptions. Hence, if there is empirical evidence of “a human inclination to be informed of what we are doing in the most integrative and general way available,” then it is evidence of an inclination to progress from rudimentary descriptions like the former toward comprehensive descriptions like the latter.

I believe that the existence of such an inclination follows from the two premises with which I have supplemented Anscombe’s theory. The goal toward which our cognitive processes are directed must be not merely registering rudimentary, observable facts but also formulating them in integrative and general terms of the sort that convey understanding. When directed at our own behavior, these processes must be oriented toward the goal of knowing what we are doing in the sort of comprehensive terms that indicate why we are doing it, by alluding to the relevant dispositions and circumstances. And the previously described shortcut to self-knowledge—the shortcut of doing what we think we are doing, or are about to do—is also a route to this high level self-knowledge. We can attain integrative knowledge of what we are doing simply by framing and fulfilling integrative conceptions of our own behavior, conceptions formulated in terms of the dispositions and circumstances that help to explain it.

In order to frame and fulfill integrative conceptions of our behavior, of course, we must be aware of a context with which to integrate it—projects and motives that we have, emotions that we feel, customs and policies that we follow, traits of character that we display, all of which afford terms for understanding our behavior as more than mere bodily movement. These other aspects of our self-conception—projects, motives, emotions, customs, policies, traits of character—will provide the materials for integrative knowledge of what we are doing, provided that we do things appropriately integrated with them. The goal of a more comprehensive knowledge of what we are doing therefore militates in favor of doing things that can be understood as motivated by our desires, expressive of our emotions, implementing our policies, manifesting our characters, and so on.

Those aspects of ourselves and our circumstances that we could incorporate into an integrative conception of doing something turn out to coincide with what we ordinarily count as reasons for doing it. When giving our reason for doing something, we often cite a desire that motivated it, an intention or policy that guided it, an emotion or opinion that animated it, a habit or trait that was manifested in it, and so on. Examples of desire-based reasons are well known; here are some examples of reasons based on other considerations that provide an explanatory context for an action:

Accordingly, I believe that reasons for doing something are facts that would provide an integrative knowledge of what we were doing, if we did that thing. Our cognitive processes will then favor framing and fulfilling a conception of ourselves as doing that thing, understood in the context of those facts, rather than other things for which we lack the elements of an equally integrative conception. As I have sometimes put it, reasons for doing something provide a rationale, an account in which our doing it is seen to cohere with our psyches and our circumstances. Whereas acting on an intention is a matter of realizing practical knowledge of what we are doing, acting for a reason is a matter of realizing more integrative practical knowledge, incorporating relevant facts that constitute reasons for acting.

My first book, Practical Reflection, explored the dynamics of practical knowledge in detail. Much of the book was devoted to drawing out the psychological and epistemological consequences of the hypothesis that framing and fulfilling a conception of what we are doing is an irresistible route to the goals of intellectual activity directed at our own behavior. Having drawn out these consequences, I argued that they help to explain various aspects of human agency.

In my subsequent papers on the philosophy of action, I tried to step back from the details of the theory and to focus on its overall shape. The kind of theory for which I argued in two of those papers adopts Anscombe’s conception of intention as a state that potentially embodies knowledge. Leaving aside the details of my dynamic hypothesis about how such knowledge is attained, I tried to show that an epistemic conception of intention enables us to explain how the future can be open from the deliberative perspective (“Epistemic Freedom”) and how intentions can be shared between two agents (“How to Share an Intention”).

In another paper (“The Story of Rational Action”), I argued for my conception of reasons for acting as considerations that would give the agent an integrative knowledge of what he was doing, if he did that for which they are reasons. The basis of my argument was an analysis of the normative force generally attributed to the axioms of formal decision theory. The fundamental theorem derived from those axioms states that if an agent’s preferences satisfy them, then there will be utility and probability functions, unique within a linear transformation, according to which those preferences maximize expected utility. I argued that the theorem itself accounts for the normative force of the axioms, because it shows that preferences obedient to them will have a context into which they can be integrated—utility and probability functions in terms of which they can be comprehensively grasped and hence supported as by reasons for acting.

In the three papers described thus far I defended the kind of theory that results from taking seriously the notion of practical knowledge, as applied by Anscombe to intention and extended by myself to reasons for acting. In five other papers I defended a kind of theory that identifies a constitutive aim of action, an aim with respect to which behavior must be somehow regulated in order to qualify as action, in the same way that cognition must be regulated for truth in order to qualify as belief. I had a particular aim in mind, of course—namely, self-knowledge and self-understanding—but, in general, I tried to abstract from it in order to argue that there must be some aim or other by virtue of which behavior qualifies as action.

In the first of these papers, “What Happens When Someone Acts,” I addressed the problem of agent causation—the problem with which I began here, of how it can be you, and not just one of your desires, that makes your arm reach out for the french fries on someone else’s plate. I argued that what plays the role of you in such a case must be a desire or drive that is in play whenever you act. I reached a similar conclusion from a different direction in the title essay, “The Possibility of Practical Reason,” where I claimed that the best way to explain the normative force of reasons for acting is to posit a constitutive aim for action as such—a second-order aim with respect to the manner in which first-order aims are pursued. “On the Aim of Belief” explored the analogous thesis that belief constitutively aims at the truth. In “Deciding How to Decide,” I argued that this strategy for explaining the normativity of reasons is preferable to the strategy, pursued by David Gauthier, of finding pragmatic justification for practical norms. And I argued in “The Guise of the Good” against assuming, in the manner of Donald Davidson, that the aim toward which reasons guide us is desirability or the good.

These papers were reprinted in the first edition of the current book. This second edition omits two other papers that were previously included (“Well-Being and Time” and “Is Motivation Internal to Value?”), because they were not strictly about the philosophy of action. In their place, I have added three papers on the philosophy of action that were written after the first edition was published. “The Way of the Wanton” offers an interpretation of Harry Frankfurt’s hierarchical theory of action and brings it into conversation with the non-action theory of Daoism. “What Good Is a Will?” critiques Michael Bratman’s theory of intention and fleshes out the interpretation of Anscombe that I have outlined here. The collection concludes with “A Note on Practical Knowledge,” which responds to objections that have been raised repeatedly—and, to my mind, impotently—against Anscombe's view as I interpret it. “Time for Action” expands on an idea first presented in “The Possibility of Practical Reason”, that action is like “work performed under management”, with practical reason exercising the managerial or supervisory role.

To those who are reading this volume on paper, I should point out that it is also available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/maize.13240734.0001.001. This edition has no index because it is searchable online.

I thank Katarina Manos for copyediting the additional chapters of this edition. I am grateful to Meredith Kahn, Aaron McCollough, Jason Colman, and Kelly Witchen at Michigan Publishing for seeing this second edition into publication. I have had the pleasure of working with Michigan Publishing for almost 15 years, since the inception of Philosophers' Imprint, the open-access journal that Stephen Darwall and I founded with their help and that they publish to this day. Their dedication to open access, for many years under the leadership of John Wilkin, Maria Bonn, and Paul Courant, has been a great service to the dissemination of academic research.