An Argument against the Causal Theory of Action Explanation

Sehon, Scott

doi:10.2307/2653428

Cited by 71 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…This approach will not reveal hypothetical psychological causal factors, but as we’ve argued, here, this incapacity is inherent in all contemporary approaches to comparative and developmental social cognition. Moreover, there are exciting new theoretical approaches to cognition that reject mental causality (e.g., Barrett 2015; Barrett and Henzi 2005; Bateson 1972; Baum 2002; Chemero 2011; Johnson 2001; Rachlin 1992; Shanker and King 2002; Varela et al 1991) in a variety of different ways that need not concern us here; the significant fact of these alternative theoretical approaches, for present purposes, is that they are not subject to the same scientific problems outlined in the preceding pages in relation to the mental causality model (Leudar and Costall 2004; Sehon 2000).…”

Section: Radical Operationalizationmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…It is a near-universal premise in the contemporary cognitive sciences that mental states cause behavior 2. While there are many critiques of this premise, including theoretical positions grounded in distributed or embodied cognitive perspectives (e.g., Barrett 2015; Chemero 2011; Johnson 2001; Sehon 2000; Varela et al 1991) and also some recent extensions of behaviorism, in which contingencies are conceived of as having very extended temporal manifestations (including Baum’s molar behaviorism and Rachlin’s teleological behaviorism; see, e.g., Baum 2002; Rachlin 1992),3 here we will establish the unfalsifiability of this premise to illustrate the logic used in the many claims of human uniqueness. As noted by Malle and Hodges (2005), there are classes of mental state that can be effects of behavior (e.g., perceptions) and there are classes of mental state that are causes (e.g., epistemic states).…”

Section: The Scientific Sterility Of Two-group Two-species Comparisonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The mismeasure of ape social cognition

2017

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In his classic analysis, Gould (The mismeasure of man, WW Norton, New York, 1981) demolished the idea that intelligence was an inherent, genetic trait of different human groups by emphasizing, among other things, (a) its sensitivity to environmental input, (b) the incommensurate pre-test preparation of different human groups, and (c) the inadequacy of the testing contexts, in many cases. According to Gould, the root cause of these oversights was confirmation bias by psychometricians, an unwarranted commitment to the idea that intelligence was a fixed, immutable quality of people. By virtue of a similar, systemic interpretive bias, in the last two decades, numerous contemporary researchers in comparative psychology have claimed human superiority over apes in social intelligence, based on two-group comparisons between postindustrial, Western Europeans and captive apes, where the apes have been isolated from European styles of social interaction, and tested with radically different procedures. Moreover, direct comparisons of humans with apes suffer from pervasive lapses in argumentation: Research designs in wide contemporary use are inherently mute about the underlying psychological causes of overt behavior. Here we analyze these problems and offer a more fruitful approach to the comparative study of social intelligence, which focuses on specific individual learning histories in specific ecological circumstances.

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Section: Radical Operationalizationmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: The Scientific Sterility Of Two-group Two-species Comparisonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The mismeasure of ape social cognition

2017

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“…Gómez concludes that both this Brentanian sense of intentionality a lá Gómez and the representational, Cartesian sense of intentionality are possessed by humans, but that non-linguistic creatures experience intentionality only in the Brentanian sense (see also a related argument by Moore 2015Moore , 2017. My own view is that this is a theoretical distinction without an empirical assay (see, esp., Leavens et al 2017;Sehon 2000). Goal-directed behaviour, on the other hand, is easily measured in objective terms (Bard 1992), and the remarks that follow are based on the Popperian idea that scientifically useful hypotheses must be potentially falsifiable.…”

Section: Intentional Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cognitive Implications of Intentional Communication: A Multifaceted Mirror

Leavens

2018

Evolution of Primate Social Cognition

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There is a central concern in contemporary cognitive science with the validity of the use of epistemic and intentional terms to interpret the communication patterns of non-human animals. Here I argue (a) that the human developmental transition to intentional communication is a well-described phenomenon, from an empirical standpoint, (b) that the behavioural patterns that characterize intentional communication in our own species are also well-described in the communication of our nearest living relatives, the great apes, (c) that the presence of the behavioural markers for intentional communication in non-human primates does not unambiguously implicate any particular one of a large number of often mutually contradictory hypothetical psychological process models, and (d) that intentional communication by young humans is also consistent with hypothetical process models that are, themselves, mutually contradictory. Intentional communication is a class of behaviour that is open to public, objective measurement. In contrast, the hypothetical cognitive processes supporting intentional communication in both human and non-human animals are not specified by the fact that intentional communication has occurred-they could not be, except when there is an unambiguous behavioural index of invisible psychological processes, which is a contradiction in terms. In this chapter, I will examine a number of contemporary scientific practices that purportedly reveal aspects of psychological processes underlying intentional communication, and demonstrate the deficiencies of these protocols. In general, these methodological infelicities support a systematic, discipline-wide double standard of interpretation of the communication of animals and humans. I will conclude that there is no convincing evidence extant of different psychological processes in the intentional communication of apes and preverbal humans.

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“…56 NOTES 1 For that very reason, some philosophers have recently argued that one should reassess the recent orthodoxy that psychological explanations are causal explanations. See for example S. Sehon, 2000. I on the other hand am still persuaded by Davidson's arguments in "Actions, Reasons, and Causes."…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Mental Causation and the Paradoxes of Explanation

Stueber

2005

Philos Stud

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In this paper I will discuss Kim's powerful explanatory exclusion argument against the causal efficacy of mental properties. Baker and Burge misconstrue Kim's challenge if they understand it as being based on a purely metaphysical understanding of causation that has no grounding in an epistemological analysis of our successful scientific practices. As I will show, the emphasis on explanatory practices can only be effective in answering Kim if it is understood as being part of the dual-explanandum strategy. Furthermore, a fundamental problem of the contemporary debate about mental causation consists in the fact that all sides take very different examples to be paradigmatic for the relation between psychological and neurobiological explanations. Even if we should expect some alignment in the explanatory scope of neurobiology and psychology/folk-psychology, there is no reason to expect that all mental explanations are exempted by physical explanations, since they do not in general explain the same phenomena.

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An Argument against the Causal Theory of Action Explanation

Cited by 71 publications

References 0 publications

The mismeasure of ape social cognition

The mismeasure of ape social cognition

The Cognitive Implications of Intentional Communication: A Multifaceted Mirror

Mental Causation and the Paradoxes of Explanation

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