Intentions are Optimality Beliefs – But Optimizing What?

Philosophical Psychology

2017

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The article discusses a challenge to the traditional intentional-causalist conceptions of action and intentionality as well as to our everyday and legal conceptions of responsibility, namely the psychological discovery that the greatest part of our alleged actions are performed automatically, i.e. unconsciously and without a proximal intention causing and sustaining them. The main part of the article scrutinises several mechanisms of automatic behaviour, how they work and whether the resulting behaviour is an action: actions caused by distal implementation intentions, four types of habit and habitualisation, mimicry and semantically induced automatic behaviour (which, however later is disregarded because of its unclarity). According to the intentional-causalist criterion, the automatic behaviours resulting from all but one of these mechanisms turn out to be actions and intentional; and even the behaviour resulting from the remaining mechanism (naturally acquired habits) is something we can be responsible for. Hence, the challenge, seen from close up, does not really call the traditional conception of action and intentionality into question.

Section: Automatic Behaviour Type 7: Semantically Induced Automatic mentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic actions: Agency, intentionality, and responsibility

Philosophical Psychology

2017

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“…Intentional causalism is not the only theory of action proposed in philosophy. But here I can neither discuss the competing conceptions nor justify intentional causalism (but see: Lumer, 2005, 235–250; Lumer, 2010, 967; 969–970; Lumer, 2013, 511–517). However, for the main task of this article it is sufficient that intentional causalism is the most important conception of action in philosophy as well as in everyday thinking and it is the basis for common Western conceptions of moral and legal responsibility.…”

Section: The Challenge Of Unconscious Motives and Actions For The mentioning

confidence: 96%

“…In order to be able to respond to the mentioned psychological challenges, beyond the bare minimum of intentional causalism some general features of a fitting model of decision making are needed. Here I will make recourse to my optimality belief theory of intention and decision making (Lumer, 2005), which says that intentions consist in optimality beliefs that a certain option is the best among the considered alternatives; furthermore, it assumes a process of decision making, leading to such optimality beliefs, with some affinities to the processes presupposed in rational decision theory but allowing much more flexibility: for example, the optimality theory assumes that there is a vast spectrum of possibilities of how extended the underlying deliberation is, from immediately believing that a certain option is optimum, over considering only one option other than doing nothing with only one relevant advantage – this is similar to Aristotle’s practical syllogisms –, to, at the other extrem, constructing complex options, compiling relevant consequences, assessing their probability and desirability, etc. Optimality judgments can also remain implicit: the subject searches for information that enables him to make an optimality judgment about one of the alternatives and keeps track of which important information is still missing.…”

Section: The Challenge Of Unconscious Motives and Actions For The mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These steps do not have to take place in exactly this order. And in fact, for mere economic reasons, they are only carried out in such detail and completely in exceptional cases; practical rationality requires very specific shortcuts (Lumer, 1990, 390–400; Lumer, 2005, 241–247; 248–250). However, to prevent these shortcuts from possibly leading to dramatically wrong decisions, certain safeguarding conditions must be fulfilled.…”

Section: The Necessity Of Consciousness For Emphatic Agency Intenmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Unconscious Motives and Actions – Agency, Freedom and Responsibility

2019

Front. Psychol.

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According to many criteria, agency, intentionality, responsibility and freedom of decision, require conscious decisions. Freud already assumed that many of our decisions are influenced by dynamically unconscious motives or that we even perform unconscious actions based on completely unconscious considerations. Such actions might not be intentional, and perhaps not even actions in the narrow sense, we would not be responsible for them and freedom of decision would be missing. Recent psychological and neurophysiological research has added to this a number of phenomena (the “new unconscious”) in which behavior is completely unconscious or in which the decision or its execution is influenced by unconscious factors: priming, automatic behavior, habitualized behavior, actions based on plain unconscious deliberations, intrusion of information from the dorsal pathway, etc. However, since this makes up the largest part of the behavior which is generally regarded as action, intentionality, yet agency, responsibility and even compatibilist freedom of decision for the largest part of our behavior may be threatened. Such considerations have led to a lively debate, which, however, suffers from generalizations that lump all these unconscious phenomena together. In contrast, the aim of this article is to discuss individual unconscious influences on our behavior separately with respect to what extent they require changes in traditional conceptualizations. The first part (sections 2–4) of the article outlines the “traditions” and their elaborations: the intentional causalist concept of action, an associated empirical theory of action and standard concepts of responsibility and compatibilist freedom of decision, as well as the challenges for them. In the second part (sections 5–9), the aforementioned unconscious influences on our actions (except for automated and habitualized actions, which I discuss elsewhere) are examined: 1. unconscious priming, 2. dynamically unconscious motives, 3. dorsal pathway information influencing conscious decisions, 4. unconsciously altered execution of conscious intentions, and 5. unconscious deliberations and decisions. To what extent do these phenomena C1. require a change in the concept of action, C2. curtail intentionality or agency, C3. responsibility, and C4. freedom? The result is: The curtailments prove to be far less dramatic than they initially appear; they require more watchfulness but no conceptual change.

“…(Lumer 2009, pp. 260-427;2005c;2014. ) P3: (On the data base d) the consequences c1, …, cn are all the relevant consequences of e. P4: The intrinsic desirability of e for s is ue.…”

Section: Practical Inferencementioning

confidence: 99%

An Epistemological Appraisal of Walton’s Argument Schemes

2022

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The article critically discusses Walton’s (and co-authors’) argument scheme approach to good argumentation. Four characteristics of Walton’s approach are presented: 1. Argument schemes provide normative requirements. 2. These schemata are enthymematic. 3. There are associated critical questions. 4. The method is inductive, abstracting schemata from groups of similar arguments. Four adequacy conditions are applied to these characteristics: AC1: effectiveness in achieving the epistemic goal of obtaining and communicating justified acceptable opinions; AC2: completeness in capturing the good argument types; AC3: efficiency in achieving the goals; AC4: justification of the argument schemes. The discussion reveals weaknesses in Walton’s account, including they are neither effective nor truly justified. A better alternative is an epistemological approach based on epistemological principles.