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Acting Against One s Best Judgement An Enquiry into Practical Reasoning, Dispositions and Weakness of Will Jeanne Peijnenburg
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Acting Against One s Best Judgement An Enquiry into Practical Reasoning, Dispositions and Weakness of Will Proefschrift ter verkrijging van het doctoraat in de Wijsbegeerte aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen op gezag van de Rector Magnificus, Dr. F. van der Woude, in het openbaar te verdedigen op donderdag 31 oktober 1996 des namiddags te 4.15 uur door Adriana Johanna Maria Peijnenburg geboren op 30 oktober 1952 te Eindhoven
Promotor: Prof. dr. Th.A.F. Kuipers Referent: Dr. J.A. van Eck
Is it possible to see this simple business as obscure and mysterious? We must try. J.S. Bell
TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction i PART ONE The History of the Akrasia Problem Chapter I: From Socrates to Stoicism 0. Introduction 3 1. Socrates 3 2. Plato 6 3. Aristotle 14 3.1 Three distinctions from the Nichomachean Ethics 16 3.2 Two questions and the last protasis 19 3.3 Two readings 24 3.4 Conclusion and evaluation 28 4. The Stoics 31 4.1 Diogenes, Plutarch and Galen 32 4.2 Stoic psychology 34 4.2.1 Pluralism 36 4.2.2 Monism 37 4.2.3 Moderate monism 38 4.2.4 A note on free will 38 PART TWO Revival in Contemporary Philosophy Chapter II: Hempel s Argument on Action Explanation 0. Introduction 43 1. The key question 46
2. Action explanations as dispositional explanations 49 3. Action explanations as rational explanations 53 3.1 Four comments 54 3.2 Acting rationally: the higher-order disposition to comply with decision theory 59 4. Criticism of Hempel s argument 61 4.0 Introduction 61 4.1 The Erklären-Verstehen controversy 62 Chapter III: The Logical Connection Argument 0. Introduction 67 1. Intentions, reasons, causes 67 2. The logical connection argument 72 3. The analyticity of the rationality assumption or the pseudo-character of DIF-2 78 3.1 Carnap s reduction sentences 79 3.2 Dispositions 84 3.3 Broad dispositions 86 3.4 Higher-order dispositions 90 3.5 Excursion: epistemic interdependence 91 3.6 Higher-order dispositions again 94 4. The analyticity of the empirical law assumption or the pseudo-character of DIF-1 95 5. Objections 96 6. The return of the akrasia problem 98 Chapter IV: Davidson s Argument on Causality 0. Introduction 103 1. An ontology of events as particulars 106 1.1 Quantifying over events 106 1.2 Solving two problems 108 2. A problem in the classical causalist view 111 3. Three noteworthy distinctions 115 3.1 DISTINCTION 1: events and descriptions of events 116 3.1.1 Pros and cons of the identity thesis 118 3.1.2 Davidson s response to Goldman s arguments 122 3.2 DISTINCTION 2: mental descriptions and physical descriptions 123
3.2.1 Mental events and physical events 123 3.2.2 Ontological token identity 126 3.3 Two thorny questions 129 3.4 DISTINCTION 3: causal statements and causal explanations 131 3.4.1 Anomalous monism 131 3.4.2 Causal statements and causal explanations 134 3.4.3 The explanation of actions 137 3.5 Summary and conclusions 140 4. Problems 142 4.1 Unsolved problems 142 4.2 Akrasia 145 PART THREE Towards a Solution Chapter V: The Concept of a Partitioned Mind 0. Introduction 149 1. Split brains 152 2. Divided minds 156 2.1 Standard economics and the divided mind 157 2.2 Kenneth May s model 160 2.3 Arrow s Impossibility Theorem 162 2.4 The model of Steedman and Krause 165 2.4.1 A multi-faceted individual 165 2.4.2 Types of character 168 2.4.3 Partial success 173 2.5 More difficulties 176 Chapter VI: The Davidsonian Division 0. Introduction 179 1. An apparent paradox: Davidson s version of the akrasia problem 180 2. Freudian thoughts 183 2.1 Three Freudian theses 184 2.2 Partitioning and structuring the mind 185 2.3 Inner conflicts and conflicting practical syllogisms 186
2.4 Handling the conflict 187 2.4.1 Two solutions 189 2.4.2 A higher-order syllogism 191 2.4.3 Prima facie and sans phrase 192 2.4.4 Practical reasoning and probabilistic reasoning: similarities 194 2.4.5 Practical reasoning and probabilistic reasoning: a difference 201 2.4.6 The principle of continence 205 2.4.7 The logical possibility of akrasia 206 2.4.8 The second revision 209 2.5 The factual possibility of akrasia and the existence of causal relations between mental parts 213 3. Evaluation and conclusion 218 Chapter VII: Dispositions and Reduction Sentences 0. Introduction 221 1. Positions in the debate on action explanation 227 2. A common misinterpretation 228 2.1 Events as causes 231 2.2 Application to reduction sentences 234 3. Hempel s approach gradualised 236 4. Making the reduction sentences probable 237 Chapter VIII: Reichenbach s Probability Meaning 0. Introduction 241 1. Reichenbach s gradualisation: probability meaning 241 2. Probability meaning: implications and resemblance to Hempel s probabilistic reduction sentences 247 2.1 Resemblance to probabilistic reduction sentences 247 2.2 Reduction and projection 249 2.3 Abstracta, illata and the question of existence 252 3. Reichenbach and Carnap 255 3.1 Three similarities 256 3.2 Excursion: open and closed terms 258 3.3 A difference 262 4. Are beliefs and desires abstracta or illata? 264 4.1 The first two groups 265
4.2 The third group 268 Chapter IX: Gradualised Dispositions and Degrees of Strength 0. Introduction 273 1. An example: agoraphobia 273 2. AP as an illatum 276 2.1 On the reduction sentence (IX.5) 277 2.2 Ways to escape 279 2.3 On the reduction sentence (IX.4) 281 2.4 A daring detour 282 3. Origin of the problem and solution 283 3.1 Analytic and synthetic 284 3.2 Pap s degree of entailment 286 3.3 Gradualised dispositions 288 3.3.1 An intuition: degree of intensity 290 3.3.2 A distinction among events 291 3.3.3 Agoraphobia again 293 3.3.4 Gradualisations: differences in domain and nature 296 3.3.5 Gradualising simple dispositions 298 3.3.6 Knowing what and knowing how much 302 4. Affinities with other views 306 Bibliography 311 Index of Names 329 Summary in Dutch
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Were it not for the material support of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and the immaterial backing of friends, colleagues, and supervisors, this book would not have been written. First of all I would like to thank my promotor, Professor Theo Kuipers, for his finely balanced and unfailingly encouraging supervision in the course of the years. I am also grateful to Dr Job van Eck, who, as a referee, made numerous suggestions for improvement. I thank Professor Joop Doorman, Professor Dagfinn Føllesdal, and Professor Erik Krabbe. They formed an almost ideal Reading Committee in that they meticulously read (and corrected!) even the bibliography, all within a short space of time. Friends have been indispensable. Some of them witnessed the gestation of this book from day to day. I am especially grateful to Jeroen and Jet, with whom I tried to explain into the wee hours many a true-to-life akratic action. I thank Han and Jan, Arjo and Thijs, Sara, and my paranimfen Linus and Rinus. The members of the Promotion Club Cognitive Patterns (PCCP) read most of the manuscript, and provided me with useful comments. The administrative staff of the Faculty of Philosophy has been very helpful, especially Ate Veenstra, who made the layout and helped with the printing. David Atkinson fashioned the cover, and he carefully checked the Dutch, the French, the German, the Latin, and, now and then, the English sentences. I dedicate this book to Japi, the scrounger in Nescio s story, who also has a fundamentum in re.
INTRODUCTION Is it possible to act against your own best judgement? Can you do something intentionally, i.e. knowingly and uncompelled, thinking at the moment when you do it that it would be better, all-things-considered, if you did not do it? That is the main problem of this book. Before going into it, let me first explain what it is not. First, it is not merely a moral problem, although it is easily and often depicted that way. Whether or not someone can go against his best judgement is a general question that has to be dealt with in action theory, not just in ethics. Ethics only comes in when the judgement concerned is a moral one. To that extent, the ethical approach to our problem might considered to be a special case of the general action theoretical analysis, or as John Benson would have it: "Moral weakness is just one variety of weakness of will." (Benson 1968, 201). Second, the problem is not how someone can change his mind. Changing your mind no doubt involves a complicated process which gives rise to many interesting philosophical questions. But those are not the questions I am interested in here. Third, the problem is also not whether someone s actions are free or determined. The debate on actions and free will is as old as it is fascinating, and it has not been satisfactorily settled. Yet I will pass it by. The only place where I will again mention the free will problem is in Section 4.2.4 of Chapter I, where I make the conjecture that questions related to free will spring from the problem that interests me here. The problem can also be phrased as follows: is it possible for a man to act akratically? Can a man be an akratès? As can already be inferred from the title of Hintikka 1988 ( Was Leibniz s Deity an Akrates? ), the question is not confined to the sublunary species that we know and love. However, I think the entire subject is already difficult enough in its restriction to mortals, and I shall, therefore, leave God for what He is. The adverb akratically, and the noun akratès are connected to the Greek noun akrasia or akrateia, usually translated by lack of selfcontrol, immoderateness, intemperance, or weakness of will. More recent translations of akrasia are irrationality, or even incontinence, thus calling forth undesired associations of physiological ailment. In recent times authors have distinguished between strict, hard, clear-eyed, synchronic or prima-facie akrasia on the one hand, and broad, soft, diachronic or apparent i
Introduction akrasia on the other (Inwood 1985; Mele 1987; Charlton 1988; Penner 1990; Price 1995). Roughly speaking, broad akrasia covers cases in which an agent fails to stand by a previous decision about what he will do. Suppose a man wants a glass of wine, and consequently takes one, although the other day he has decided not to drink any more. Then his drinking is an akratic action in the broad sense of the word; at the very moment the man starts to drink, he prefers drinking over not drinking. As will be clear from this example, broad akrasia usually touches upon the question of how someone can change his mind. Since that is not the question I am dealing with here, my use of the word akrasia refers to strict (hard, clear-eyed, synchronic) akrasia. A strict akratic action goes against a judgement which the agent still considers the best at the time of the action. Are such actions possible, then? It seems rather foolish to deny that they are. Daily life is full of akratic actions, and a substantial part of the world literature would be inconceivable without them. Homerus Helena knows she should not run away with Paris, yet she lets him abduct her. Euripides Medea knows she should not murder her children, still she perpetrates the blood-curdling crime. Flaubert s Emma Bovary firmly decides not to see Rodolphe anymore, nonetheless she looks for him in the woods around Yonville. "I do know where [the truth] lies", twenty-eightyear-old Vita Sackville-West writes on the first page of her diary, "but I have no strength to grasp it; here I am already in the middle of my infirmities." In his characteristic, visionary style Frederik van Eeden described the phenomenon thus: "Feeling myself to be a helpless thing driven by irresistible forces. Feeling myself to be split in two, one that acts, the other that observes, shocked, and asks: what are you doing? That is not at all what you want? Don t do it. Are you really doing it? " (Van Eeden 1892, 349). 1 1 My translation of: "Mijzelf voelen een hulpeloos ding, dat gedreven wordt door oversterke machten. Mijzelf voelen twee, de een die doet, de ander die verschrikt toeziet en vraagt: wat doe je? Dat wil je immers niet? Doe het niet. Doe je het nu toch? " About the same time, the French novelist Alphonse Daudet exclaimed on the first page of his Notes sur la vie: "Homo duplex, homo duplex!... This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have ii
Introduction A walking, or perhaps we had better say reclining, example of an akratès is Gontsjarov s Oblomov. Oblomov very well knows that he should get up and dress himself; in fact, several times a day he solemnly decides to do so. Yet he stays in bed, continuing the cantankerous squabbles with his servant Zahar. In 1864 Fjodor Dostoyevsky published a novel which is entirely devoted to the phenomenon of akratic actions, Notes from Underground. In this brief but psychologically rich book the I argues that man often acts against his own interest, and that this exactly is what makes man human. Man is, I argues, just like that friend of his: "You see, ladies and gentlemen, I have a friend - of course, he s your friend, too, and, in fact, everyone s friend. When he s about to do something, this friend explains pompously and in detail how he must act in accordance with the precepts of justice and reason. Moreover, he becomes passionate as he expostulates upon human interests.... Then,... without any apparent external cause,..., he pirouettes and starts saying exactly the opposite of what he was saying before; that is, he discredits the laws of logic and his own advantage.... Now, since my friend is a composite type, he cannot be dismissed as an odd individual." (Notes from Underground, Chapter VII, translation by A.R. MacAndrew; cf. Davidson 1970a, 29, footnote 12, which, too, contains a quote from the book). Long before Dostoyevsky, the phenomenon of akratic actions stupefied Augustine of Hippo. The mind orders itself to will, Augustine argues, and in doing so the mind itself is willing something; yet what it wills it does not do. "How can this incredible thing be? Why is this so?", Augustine repeatedly exclaims, as usual slightly in despair. 2 Indeed, Augustine made matters even more complex by his puzzling prayer in the Confessiones VIII, never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!" (translated and quoted by William James - James 1901-1902, 173). 2 "Unde hoc monstrum? Et quare istuc?" (Confessiones VIII, 9). iii
Introduction 7, which became a famous joke: "Give me chastity and continence, Lord, but not yet." Paul, to mention another sinner who rose to be a saint, seems to have been entangled in a similar struggle. His lament to the Romans is wellknown: "For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that I do.... the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do." (Romans 7:15, 7:19). P.L. Gardiner, not a saint but at any rate an ethicist, even goes so far as to deny that akratic actions are exceptions. They are part of normal human behaviour, Gardiner argues; it is the non-akratic behaviour that is peculiar and thus in need of an explanation (Gardiner 1954; a similar opinion is put forward by Horsburgh in Horsburgh 1954). Even though akratic actions are part and parcel of daily life and classic literature, they nonetheless constitute a grave problem for scientists and philosophers. Disparate philosophers and many psychologists have tried to capture the meaning and the origin of akratic behaviour. As for philosophy, most of the attempts to understand akrasia are made explicitly, as in Mele s Irrationality, Davidson s How is Weakness of the Will Possible?, or Jeffrey s Preference among Preferences. But there also exist implicit attempts. An example of the latter is Anscombe s famous study on intention. Anscombe s book gained wide attention and became a classic in the field; yet it has been scarcely noticed that it is, at least in part, an attempt to cope with akrasia. The book culminates in a reference to the akratic behaviour of yet another saint, viz. St. Peter. While Jesus was led away to Annas and Caiaphas, Peter "did not change his mind about denying Christ, and was not prevented from carrying out his resolution not to, and yet did deny him" (Anscombe 1957, 93). In order to explain this fullblooded akratic action, Anscombe is driven back to assumptions about "ignorance as to the way in which the prophecy would be fulfilled" (Anscombe 1957, 94). Only by invoking such miraculous presumptions can she draw her final conclusion and write down the last words of her fine book: "thus St. Peter could do what he intended not to, without changing his mind, and yet do it intentionally" (Anscombe 1957, 94). In the sequel I will cite Anscombe several times, but contrary to her approach I shall eschew invoking the Christian Revelation. As far as the interest of psychologists in akrasia is concerned, we can point to all of those psychological experiments which tell us that irrational actions do occur, even though they are very difficult to understand. In an interview granted to Fred Backus of NRC-Handelsblad, Nico Frijda iv
Introduction mentions the occurrence of irrational actions as an example of whatpsychology-does-not-yet-understand: NF: For instance, how does it happen that people do things they know to be irrational. FB: They react with their reptile brain. NF: Yes, but that is no answer. Because they know that they react with their reptile brain and at the same time they know that it is not rational. I have not managed to find a conclusive explanation for this; by the way, no one has. 3 The philosopher and psychologist Jaap van Heerden confides a similar thought to Max Pam of Vrij Nederland: "People perform actions that they did not intend, or even positively wished to avoid.... Human behaviour is miraculously contradictory. Apparently you don t want what you want most." 4 In this domain, Van Heerden argues, it is practically impossible to measure or to explain something in a scientific manner. If we want to explain irrational behaviour, then we must accept "the unconscious". On the other 3 My translation of: NF: "Hoe het bijvoorbeeld komt dat mensen dingen doen waarvan ze wéten dat ze niet verstandig zijn." FB: Ze reageren vanuit hun reptielehersenen. NF: "Ja, maar dat is geen antwoord. Want ze weten dat ze vanuit hun reptielehersenen reageren en tegelijkertijd weten ze dat het niet verstandig is. Om daar een sluitende verklaring voor te vinden - dat is mij nog niet gelukt. Niemand trouwens." (In: De mond vol tanden. Dertig vraaggesprekken over wat de wetenschap niet weet. Prometheus, Amsterdam, 1992, 93.) 4 "Mensen verrichten handelingen die zij niet van plan waren, of eigenlijk in het geheel niet wilden.... Het menselijk gedrag is wonderlijk tegenstrijdig. Kennelijk wil je niet wat je het liefste wilt" (Vrij Nederland 27-5-1978). v
Introduction hand, Van Heerden realises very well that "methodologists will immediately raise the objection that the unconscious is an unworkable concept." 5 Later I will try to do what Van Heerden thinks is impossible: account for irrational behaviour without using the concept of the unconsciousness. This book consists in three parts. The first part deals with the history of the akrasia problem. It comprises only one chapter, in which I describe how the old Greeks and the early Stoics struggled with the problem. Then I make a huge jump, leaping right over the Middle Ages and early modern times, to the contemporary scene discussed in Part Two. I argue that the old akrasia problem, after having lain dormant for ages, reappeared on the philosophical stage as a result of the debate on action explanation. Within this debate I distinguish three different factions, headed respectively by Carl G. Hempel, Georg Henrik von Wright and Donald Davidson. Their positions are discussed in Chapters II, III and IV. I explain that each of the factions stumbles upon the akrasia problem, and that none of them is able to solve it. Part Three is called Towards a Solution. It has five chapters, of which the first, Chapter V, is about the notion of a divided mind. This chapter mainly serves as an introduction to Chapter VI, which is devoted to Davidson s famous solution of the akrasia problem. In that chapter I show how Davidson s solution makes use of three Freudian ideas: the idea that the mind consists of parts, that among the parts conflicts may arise, and that the parts can interact causally. Especially the latter idea, the idea of mental causation, will prove to be bothersome. In Chapters VII-IX I develop my own solution, from which the concept of mental causation is banished altogether. The crucial notion in my approach is the notion of grade or degree. I distinguish between degrees of probability on the one hand and degrees of intensity or strength on the other. As far as degrees of probability are concerned, I extend an argument concerning the works of Hempel and Hans Reichenbach (Chapter VII and Chapter VIII), only to show why their approaches are unsatisfactory. In Chapter IX I maintain that the notion of degrees of strength can give us a better understanding of what happens when a person acts irrationally. 5 "Op dat terrein is het vrijwel onmogelijk iets te meten of wetenschappelijk te verklaren en methodologen zullen dan ook onmiddellijk naar voren brengen dat het onbewuste een onhanteerbaar begrip is" (ibid.). vi