1
Knowledge, Causal Explanation, and Teleology
JOHANNES ROESSLER
[Forthcoming in Oxford Studies of Epistemology]
Can knowledge make a difference? Is Janet’s reaching into her bag causally
explained, partly, by the fact that she knows that her mobile phone is in the bag?
In ‘Knowledge as a mental state’ Jennifer Nagel spearheads a debate between three
perspectives on this question. The standard view in philosophy is that knowledge is
not causally relevant: it’s belief that ‘does the causal work’. Connectedly, on this
view, knowing that p is a mental state only in what Timothy Williamson labels the
'dull’ sense, i.e. courtesy of the mental state it entails or involves, viz. believing that p.
Knowing that p is not a mental state in the contentious and interesting sense — the
one intended, and endorsed, by Williamson — that there is a kind of mental state that
is both necessary and sufficient for knowing that p. (Williamson 1995: 533) It’s here
that Nagel finds a head-on collision between current orthodoxy in philosophy and
psychology. ‘The standard view in psychology’, she maintains, ‘is that knowledge is a
mental state; indeed, knowledge typically features prominently in lists of
paradigmatic mental states.’ (14) Towards the end of her article, the two disciplines
are joined by what might loosely be described as a third discipline: the view of
commonsense psychology or, in the Humean phrase, the ‘vulgar’ view. Nagel
characterizes this view as follows: ‘our natural mindreading systems parse agency
with the help of epistemic mental state concepts of knowledge and belief rather than
belief alone.’ (23)
2
Let’s call the view that knowledge is a mental state (in the contentious sense)
mentalism. Nagel’s project may be described, in abstract terms, as aimed to show that
the ‘vulgar’ view is mentalist, and that developmental psychology can help to deepen
our understanding of its mentalist commitments. I enthusiastically agree with both
points. But I would like to question some of Nagel’s more specific claims. A chief
concern of her paper is with the idea of conceptual priority. As she presents the
debate, a view shared by mainstream psychologists and Williamson is that the concept
of belief is ‘something derived from the concept of knowledge.’ (p. 2, my emphasis) I
find both attributions, and the view itself, doubtful, and in any case I think mentalism
is not committed to it. I develop and defend these points in the first two sections. In
section 3, I focus on the ‘vulgar’ view’. Why do we find it so natural to explain
Janet’s action in terms of her knowledge? In Nagel’s discussion, commonsense
mentalism features as a naïve theory of the causes of behaviour. I want to suggest that
this account conceals the rationale of commonsense mentalism, which lies in the role
of knowledge in providing us with reasons. We can deepen our understanding of that
rationale by looking at the pre-history of commonsense psychology: specifically, at
young children’s teleological schema of action explanation (here I’ll follow Perner
and Roessler 2010). This genealogy helps to bring out the connection between
mentalism and the pre-theoretical conception we have of ourselves and others as
rational agents.
1. Conceptual priority
According to a strong tradition in philosophy, the concept of belief in an important
sense more basic that the concept of knowledge. This is evidently a view Williamson
rejects. He frequently inveighs against the idea that ‘belief is conceptually prior to
3
knowledge’. (2000: 8) Nagel’s Williamson not only rejects the traditional priority
thesis; he also endorses its converse. He claims that the concept of knowledge is
‘more basic’ than the concept of belief, and that latter is ‘derived’ from the former.
There is a tendency, in Nagel’s discussion, to conflate mentalism with this converse
priority claim. I want to suggest that the two views need to be sharply distinguished,
and not just in the interest of proper bookkeeping. Mentalists are not compelled to
trade one priority claim for another. They may opt for a ‘no priority’ view.
What does it mean to say that one concept is prior to another? It’s natural to think that
conceptual priority has something to do with the order of analysis. For example, on
the traditional view, the concept of belief is prior in the sense that it denotes one of
the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for knowledge, where these conditions
are seen as providing for a non-circular, reductive analysis of the concept of
knowledge. Let’s call this analytic priority. A related idea might be that mastery of
the concept of knowledge requires mastery of the concept of belief but not vice versa.
Let’s call this psychological priority. Note that psychological priority has a certain
modal force: it’s impossible to grasp knows without grasping believes. This is one
respect in which the claim differs from what might be called developmental priority,
the idea that normally developing humans grasp the concept of belief before they
grasp the concept of knowledge.
According to the converse priority claim Nagel is interested in, and appears to
endorse, knows is prior to believes in all three senses. In the next section, I look at the
evidence regarding developmental priority. In the rest of this section, I consider these
4
questions: (1) Does mentalism commit one to Nagel’s priority thesis? (2) Does
Williamson endorse the thesis? (3) How plausible is the thesis?
Mentalism is a claim about the state of knowing, not about the concept of knowledge.
You might wonder, therefore, whether as a metaphysical thesis, it may not simply be
neutral on conceptual issues. This would be a mistake, though. Mentalism arguably
does commit one to the rejection of the traditional priority view. Crudely put, the idea
is this. Suppose believes is analytically prior to knows. This would imply that there is
a successful reductive analysis of knows in terms of the more basic concepts believes,
is true, and so on. These more basic concepts would, in turn, enable us to identify the
circumstances whose obtaining would be sufficient for the state of knowing. So
knowledge would turn out to be a ‘composite’ state, involving among other things, the
mental element of believing that p and the (typically) non-mental element of p being
true. If this were so, believing that p would be a kind of mental state that’s necessary
for knowing that p, but there would be no kind of mental state that is necessary and
sufficient for knowing that p. So knowing would not be a mental state.
There is more to be said about this argument, but in the current context the important
question is: does mentalism also have positive implications as regards conceptual
priority? Does it commit one to accepting the priority of knows over believes? One
reason for denying this is that mentalism would appear to be neutral on the question
whether believes is open to any interesting conceptual analysis at all (let alone one in
terms of knows). So it’s hard to see how mentalism could entail the analytic priority
of knows. Again mentalism surely carries no commitment that one can grasp knows
independently of mastery of the concept of belief: a mentalist might coherently think
5
of the two conceptual abilities as interdependent. Finally, mentalists can afford to
keep an open mind on the developmental trajectory. Certainly if there were
convincing evidence that knows is understood before believes this would put pressure
on the traditional priority view, and would perhaps count in favour of mentalism. But
if it turned out that the two concepts were acquired in the reverse order, mentalists
should lose no sleep over this. They never claimed that either concept was more basic
than the other.
Nagel’s priority claim is inspired, partly, by a striking remark of Williamson’s, that
‘believing p is, roughly, treating p as if one knew p.’ (2000: 47) The remark may
seem to suggest that we can explain what it means to believe something in terms of a
prior, independent understanding of knowledge. So we should not just reject, but
reverse the traditional priority claim. But it’s not clear that the text licenses such an
interpretation. Notice, first, that Williamson’s slogan is not intended as an attempt at
conceptual analysis. The slogan is preceded by this disclaimer: ‘Although a fullblown exact conceptual analysis of believes in terms of knows is too much to expect,
we can still postulate a looser connection along these lines.’ (2000: 47) A claim to
analytic priority does not seem to be what Williamson has in mind at all. Then how
should the ‘looser connection’ be understood? Williamson apparently intends the
slogan to express what he regards as an important normative thesis, stated in the
sentence succeeding the slogan: ‘Knowledge sets the standard of appropriateness of
belief.’ (2000: 47) The idea here is that belief does not just ‘aim at truth’ but at
knowledge: ‘Mere believing is a kind of botched knowing.’ (ibd.) This raises a
number of questions, but the point that matters in the present context is that
Williamson’s normative thesis is neutral both on the analytic and psychological
6
priority of knows. It would presumably entail that understanding belief requires
understanding knowledge. But it’s consistent with allowing that understanding
knowledge in turn requires understanding belief. It’s consistent with a ‘no priority’
view.
One reason Williamson shies away from a ‘full-blown conceptual analysis’ is that he
thinks there are counterexamples: ‘one might know p while in a sense treating p as if
one did not know p’. (ibd.) But there is also the question whether the slogan can be
elaborated without invoking belief. What does it mean to treat p as if one knew p?
Williamson says it is ‘to treat p in ways similar to the ways in which subjects treat
propositions which they know’. (2000: 46-7) One thing he has in mind is reliance on a
proposition in practical reasoning. Evidently more would need to be said about what
counts as relevantly similar here. The way we treat p when we pretend that p is not
dissimilar to the way we treat propositions we know. If we mark the difference by
saying that the relevant ways of treating p should involve acceptance of p, not much
constructive progress towards a full-blown analysis would have been made. These
points do not amount to decisive objections to the priority of knows. What they bring
out is that it would be precipitate to expect that an analysis of believes in terms of
knows will not set in motion the cycle of counterexamples, modifications and further
counterexamples familiar from discussions of the traditional priority claim. Nagel
appears to think her converse priority claim is needed to accommodate the fact that
knows entails believes. She writes that Williamson ‘allows the entailment by
characterizing belief as a potentially diluted version of knowing’. (14) The
assumption here seems to be that to ‘allow’ the entailment we have to make it
intelligible in terms of an analysis (or characterization) of one of the concepts
7
involved. It’s not clear exactly how the idea that believing p is treating p as if one
knew p is supposed to make the entailment intelligible. In any case, the assumption is
far from trivial, and it is one that Williamson explicitly rejects.1
2. Knowledge first?
Nagel offers two reasons for her claim that the ‘standard view in psychology is that
knowledge is a mental state’. One is the observation that knowledge frequently
features in psychologists’ lists of mental states: it’s considered to be one of the states
children need to learn about in acquiring a ‘theory of mind’. The second reason turns
on Nagel’s reading of the current state of play in psychology regarding the relative
priority of knows and believes; specifically: on her claim that it is ‘generally agreed
[in psychology] that belief is the more sophisticated concept, and harder to attribute
than knowledge’ (p. 15).
The inclusion of knowledge in psychologists’ lists is certainly a striking datum, but
I’m not convinced it can bear the weight Nagel assigns to it. The question whether
knowledge is a mental state, not just in what Williamson calls the ‘dull’ sense but in
the contentious sense, is a distinctly philosophical question. It turns on issues such as
whether knowledge is a conjunctive state, whether the concept of knowledge is
analyzable, or whether the apparent causal relevance of knowledge can be reductively
explained in terms of other factors. That psychologists tend to include knowledge in
their lists provides no evidence that they are inclined to take a stand on these
philosophical problems. In my experience psychologists are disinclined to do so even
when pressed. A plausible interpretation of the inclusion of ‘knowledge’ in the lists is
1
‘More generally, the existence of conceptual connections is a bad reason to postulate
an analysis of a concept to explain them.’ (2000: 33)
8
that a ‘theory of mind’ is assumed to involve the kinds of concepts we use in making
sense of our own and others’ actions. That knowledge plays a prominent role in this
enterprise is something not even proponents of the standard ‘philosophical’ view of
knowledge would deny. (I’ll come back to this in the final section.)
Recent findings on children’s understanding of knowledge can be sorted into three
groups:
(i) Findings that appear to show that attributions of knowledge are easier than
attributions of belief. For instance, Sodian et al 2006 found clear evidence that
3-year-olds are able to discriminate between good and bad informants: when
asked to choose between two possible helpers in a hide-and-seek task, they
tend to select the knowledgeable helper — the one who saw the object being
hidden. This contrasts with 3-year-olds’ notoriously poor performance on
false-belief tasks.
(ii) Findings that appear to show that the two kinds of attributions are equally
hard. For instance. Gopnik and Graf (1988) found that 4-year-olds were much
better than 3-year-olds at answering questions about how they knew what was
inside a box (whether they saw it, were told, or received a clue).
(iii) Findings that appear to shows that attributions of knowledge are harder than
attributions of belief. Several kinds of studies suggest that up until the age of
about 5 children dramatically overestimate the range of facts made manifest to
us by perceiving an object. For instance, 4-year-olds confidently predict that
someone will be able to recognize a depicted animal on the basis of seeing a
small, unidentifiable fragment of the drawing. (Chandler and Helm 1984)
9
This complex picture of the developmental progression raises several theoretical
possibilities. One is that the easier tasks fail to probe children’s understanding of
propositional knowledge. For example, it might be said that 3-year-olds’ adeptness at
simple ignorance tasks reflects their understanding of the role of seeing or looking as
an enabling condition of successful action, with the word ‘knowledge’ being used
simply to express a disposition for acting successfully. (Perner 1991: 304) A second
possibility is that children’s mastery of the concept of knowledge gradually matures
between the ages of 3 and 6. Thus Elizabeth Robinson summarizes her recent review
of the evidence by saying that there is, over this time span, ‘no single point at which
we would deem a child to have achieved understanding [of the connection between
perceptual access and knowledge state].’ (Robinson 2010: 338; see Doherty 2009: 67
for a similar view) Finally, it may be held that 3-year-olds have an unimpaired grasp
of the concept of knowledge and that their difficulties with the harder tasks reflect
extraneous factors, such as higher demands on working memory.
Only the third theoretical possibility is consistent with Nagel’s developmental claim
that belief is ‘harder to attribute than knowledge’. The first possibility would suggest
that belief and knowledge are either equally hard or that knowledge is harder. From
the second possibility we could conclude, at best, that a less-than-fullycomprehending use of ‘knows’ is easier than a comprehending use of ‘believes’.
Nagel does recognize the experimental challenge facing her priority claim. She raises
the question whether children are ‘really referring to knowledge as such’ when
tackling simple ignorance tasks, and she refers to ‘studies of immature and evolving
mental concept use’. (p. 26) Having raised the question, Nagel unexpectedly turns to
10
comparative psychology, with a view to ascertaining whether non-human primates
may find knowledge easier to attribute than belief. I won’t go into this part of her
discussion, but it seems to me that even if, as she argues, there is strong support for
the view that chimpanzees are able to recognize knowledge (but not belief), it’s hard
to see how this helps to resolve the debate over the interpretation of human 3-yearolds’ performance on ignorance tasks. As indicated, the evidence is far from clear-cut.
But it seems to me closer scrutiny suggests that the third theoretical possibility is the
least plausible one.
Advocates of the third possibility think that success on simple ignorance tasks bring
to light a real understanding of the connection between seeing and knowing: 3-yearolds realize that the reason only one of two protagonists knows which kind of object
is inside a box is that only she saw the object. It’s not just that children understand
something about object perception, for example that you can’t see an object when it’s
placed inside a non-transparent box (unless the lid if lifted). They also grasp that
seeing an object makes it possible to see where the object is and what it is like, e.g. to
see (and hence know) that it is a pen. With this basic explanatory schema in place,
children can be said to grasp the difference between knowledge and ignorance. On
this analysis, even 3-year-olds know what knowledge is, notwithstanding their welldocumented tendency to attribute perceptual knowledge a bit promiscuously. It’s not
clear, though, that this basic explanatory scheme is sophisticated enough to warrant
the attribution of the concept of knowledge. The problem is that someone’s seeing an
object O is not, on its own, an adequate explanation of her knowledge that O is F.
There is a second dimension to our conception of the conditions that make epistemic
seeing possible. The subject also has to be able to recognize the object as having the
11
relevant property or falling under the relevant type. Whether in seeing O the subject
can see (without inference) that O is F depends on familiar conditions such as which
kind of property is in question, the subject’s recognitional abilities, distance,
viewpoint, lighting, and so forth. Suppose you don’t believe in the importance of such
conditions. You think that seeing an object O that is in fact F is sufficient for seeing
that O is F. I think this would raise legitimate doubts as to whether you know what
epistemic seeing is. It might be said that you simply subscribe to an eccentric theory,
on which seeing an object, through the operation of some magical mechanism, makes
the perceiver omniscient about the object. But that would be to assume that you do
appreciate the need for some further explanation of how object perception yields
knowledge (it’s just that your explanation is inadequate). If, as we are supposing, you
don’t see that need at all, it’s hard to understand just what you have in mind. On one
interpretation, findings of type (ii) and (iii) suggest that your puzzling conception of
epistemic seeing is the one that prevails among 3-year-olds. They show that young
children are oblivious to the second dimension of our ordinary conception of the
enabling conditions of epistemic seeing. For example, Martin Doherty hypothesizes
that ‘children simply think that any direct perceptual access to an object is sufficient
to know all aspects of the object.’ (2009: 65) If this interpretation is correct, we
should be reluctant to credit 3-year-olds with a proper understanding of epistemic
seeing, despite their success on simple ignorance tests.
3. Reasons
Anti-mentalists deny that Janet reaches into her bag because she knows her mobile is
there. The causally relevant mental state, they think, is belief. This doesn’t mean that
anti-mentalists are unaware that we frequently make sense of what people do in terms
12
of what they know. In a passage often cited as a canonical statement of an ‘internalist’
approach to causal relevance, Jaegwon Kim writes: ‘I know that if I turn this knob
counterclockwise the burner will go on. Since I want the fire to go on, I turn the knob.
My knowledge that turning the knob will cause the burner to go on plays a causal role
in the explanation of my action of turning the knob. This is a simple and familiar sort
of action explanation.’ (1993: 188) Note that Kim doesn’t simply dismiss such talk, as
you might dismiss appeal to the putative efficacy of telepathy. Our mistake in
crediting knowledge with causal powers, on his view, is merely that we conflate what
are in fact two distinct explanations. First, there is the explanation of his turning the
knob, in terms of his belief that turning the knob causes the burner to go on. Kim
thinks that only this part of the overall explanation is correctly labelled psychological.
It’s no business of psychology, he insists, to explain why the burner went on. Second,
his turning the knob, together with the non-psychological fact that doing so causes the
burner to go on, explains his turning on the burner. Actually, if the ostensible
explanatory role of knowledge is to be successfully dismantled, we need to
distinguish a third explanatory project (though Kim does not mention this). Suppose
we are interested in whether turning on the burner was something he did intentionally.
That the action is explained by his wanting to turn on the burner and his believing that
he can do so by turning the knob provides no adequate answer to this question. If his
belief is true by sheer luck —if, for example, he has conclusive evidence that the
burner is not operational — the action won’t be intentional under the description
‘turning on the burner’.2 On the face of it, the fact that he acts on the basis of
knowledge is highly pertinent to our understanding of the action as intentional. On
Kim’s reductive account, this will have to be analyzed in terms of non-factive notions,
2
Gibbons 2001 makes a persuasive case for this.
13
such as the fact that the action was caused by a justified belief (no doubt plus further
conditions).
Nagel’s distinctive response to this reductive project is to highlight the naturalness of
the natural view. In her concluding section she writes that knowledge is ‘naturally’
perceived as a mental state, that ‘our natural mindreading systems parse agency with
the help of epistemic mental state concepts’ (31), and that we should place ‘trust in
our natural instincts’ about people’s mental states (32). Notice, though, that the
reductionist can agree with a lot of this. Kim characterizes explanations that give a
causal role to knowledge as ‘simple and familiar’. He should be equally happy to
acknowledge that they are natural and intuitive. His question is whether they are
correct. The most explicit statement I could find of Nagel’s position on this question
is the following: ‘If the test of a theory is its capacity to generate good predictions and
explanations, then anyone with a non-skeptical attitude towards intuitive mindreading
should see the thesis that knowledge is a mental state as well confirmed.’ (33) It does
seem plausible that if intuitive mindreading yields good — i.e. correct —
explanations, that would be a compelling reason to adopt a non-skeptical attitude
towards it. But reductionists think that the intuitive explanatory role of knowledge
fails to make salient the real causal-explanatory structure of the situation. Strictly
speaking, such explanations are not correct. Appeal to the mindreading system’s
alleged capacity to generate good explanations will cut no ice with a reductionist. Of
course reductionists can and should grant that explanations in terms of knowledge
may be ‘good’ in other ways. They are simple, useful and very natural to us. That
point, though, is not enough to establish that mentalism is a well-confirmed thesis.
14
The real issue surely is not whether reductionism is revisionist — it’s agreed on all
hands that it is — but whether the reductive project is mandatory, and whether it can
succeed. This is of course a large and difficult question. A number of debates in the
philosophy of mind are relevant to it. I won’t try to answer the question here, but I
want to end with a suggestion as to what makes the ‘vulgar’ view so natural. This is
not the same as the question whether the view is correct, but to assess the credentials
of the vulgar view we need a proper understanding of its rationale. We can usefully
approach this issue by reflection on the pre-history of the commonsense ‘theory of
mind’. 3
3-year-olds find it hard to understand how someone’s beliefs, or for that matter
knowledge, affect their intentional actions. Does that mean 3-year-olds lack the very
notion of intentional action? If to act intentionally is to act for a reason, and practical
reasons are pairs of beliefs and desires, it’s hard to see how the idea of someone
doing something intentionally could be available to 3-year-olds. It would be no help,
for example, to suggest that at least they have some understanding of the explanatory
role of desires. A desire, on its own, does not amount to a practical reason. The key to
the solution to this problem lies in young children’s performance on standard false
belief tasks. The striking finding here is that when asked where the protagonist will go
(in order to retrieve a desirable object, surreptitiously displaced by someone else)
children are not guessing. On the contrary: they consistently and confidently give the
wrong answer. They are adamant that Maxi is heading towards the cupboard (where
the chocolate is) rather than the drawer (where he put it). Children assume, it seems,
that Maxi will do what it makes sense for him to do, i.e. what he has reason to do. The
3
For a more detailed exposition and defence of the developmental hypothesis I’m
about to sketch, see Perner and Roessler 2010; Perner and Roessler (forthcoming).
15
point can be obscured by the widespread tendency amongst philosophers of mind to
equate reasons with the explanantia of ‘rationalizing explanations’, i.e. mental states
such as beliefs and desires. Ordinarily, though, we don’t think of reasons in that way.
Suppose you advise Maxi on where he should go. The obvious point to make would
be that he should go to the cupboard, given that this is where the chocolate is. It’s the
fact that the chocolate is in the cupboard that is a reason for him to go there. It would
be perverse for you to tell Maxi that he should go to the drawer, on the grounds that
he believes that that’s where the chocolate is. True, there is a sense in which Maxi
should go to the drawer: it’s rational for him to do so, given his belief. But there is
also an obvious sense in which it’s the cupboard he should go to. What we need here
is a distinction between two kinds of practical ‘ought’: in Nico Kolodny’s terms, the
‘ought of rationality’ and the ‘ought of reasons’. (Kolodny 2005)
You may expect that someone will do what he has reason to do because you think he
is well-informed and sensible. But in the case of young children a more plausible
hypothesis is this: they expect that people act intentionally, and they take intentional
actions to be explained by reasons, rather than by ‘rationalizing’ mental states. In
other words, prior to the acquisition of a ‘theory of mind’ children use a ‘teleological’
schema of action explanation, invoking evaluative and instrumental facts. One
attraction of this hypothesis is that it points to a solution to the problem of how it is
possible for children to have even a rudimentary idea of what it means to act
intentionally. Another attraction is that the hypothesis may explain various
shortcomings of children’s explicit thinking about actions.4
4
See Perner and Roessler 2010, for a review of relevant experimental findings.
16
There is an obvious point of contact between children’s primitive teleology and the
‘vulgar’ view of knowledge: both assign causal relevance to reason-giving facts. The
teleological schema does this simply by ignoring the explanatory role of agents’
perspective on what they have reason to do. Under children’s austere version of the
principle of charity, it’s assumed that agents will do what they ought to do (in the
‘ought of reasons’ sense). Mature commonsense psychology is mindful of the
importance of the agent’s perspective, but conceives of perspectives as involving
factive mental states. If Janet reaches into her bag because she needs to make a phone
call and knows that her mobile phone is in the bag, the attitude that makes her action
rational is one that entails that there is a reason for what she is doing. 5 Mentalism
thus protects an element of the primitive teleology via which we are inducted into the
commonsense conception of people as intentional agents. Perhaps we find mentalism
natural partly for that reason. More significantly, this commonality between teleology
and mentalism brings out one sense in which the reductionist dismantling of the
causal role of knowledge would seem to involve ‘explanatory loss’. If you explain
Janet’s action by invoking her belief rather than her knowledge, the explanation no
longer provides any reassurance as to whether she reached into her bag for a reason.
Your explanation is after all consistent with Janet’s mobile phone having been stolen,
in which case she would have been mistaken in believing that there was a good reason
for her to reach into her bag. In extracting the mobile, the pickpocket would have
simultaneously deprived Janet’s action of its point. It’s here, I think, that we may be
able to see the beginnings of an explanation of what makes the ‘vulgar’ view natural
to us. We like to think of our actions as not merely rational — something that is
consistent with their lacking any real point — but done for reasons. This is certainly a
5
For elaboration and defence of the view that acting for the justifying reason that p
requires knowing that p, see Hornsby 2008. For dissent, see Dancy 2011.
17
natural view to take for a deliberating agent. The point of deliberation is to determine
what one will do through reflection on one’s reasons, and it would be nonsensical to
deliberate if one didn’t take deliberation to be (in general) a way of settling what one
will in fact do. As Richard Moran remarks, ‘there is no point in calling it
“deliberation” any more, if [the deliberator] takes it to be an open question whether
this activity will determine what he actually does or believes.’ (2001: 127) Moran
rightly characterizes the perspective of deliberation as one ‘where reasons that justify
are at issue’. Less plausibly, he contrasts this with the ‘stance of causal explanation’.
If a deliberator is committed to thinking of deliberation as (generally) effective, it’s
hard to see how ‘reasons that justify’ can be insulated from concerns with causal
explanation. A deliberator will naturally think of such reasons as the very reasons for
which she is acting. She will be aware, of course, at least by the age of 4, that to make
a difference reasons must be apparent to the agent. But this realization does not
compel a separation of the ‘stances’ of justification and explanation. A reason that’s
apparent to the agent need not be a merely apparent reason. It may be a consideration
the agent knows to be true.6
If this analysis is on the right lines, mentalism is natural to us not because it is a
theory we (or ‘our natural mindreading systems’) take to generate valuable
explanations and predictions of people’s conduct. We find mentalism intuitive
because we naturally think of our own and others’ intentional actions from the
perspective of deliberators, rather than from the perspective of theorists. Whether
mentalism can be sustained is of course a further question, but the teleological
analysis of what makes it natural to us certainly does not make things easier for the
6
Of course the truth of the consideration is merely a necessary, not a sufficient
condition for its amounting to a reason for some particular course of action.
18
reductionist. She may either seek to analyze the content of our natural belief in the
causal relevance of reasons in terms she regards as unproblematic. For example, she
might insist that all we should be taken to have in mind is that actions are caused by
beliefs and desires. Alternatively, she might debunk the natural belief in the efficacy
of reasons as a remnant of a teleological, ‘pre-disenchanted’ (and possibly infantile)
view of causal explanation. The first option is arguably implausible as an account of
reasons for actions, and distorts the way we ordinarily think about such reasons. The
second option, if Moran is right, would jettison a commitment integral to our ordinary
sense of self. Whether this amounts to an objection is a question that would require
detailed investigation. It may turn out that reductionism would take with it rather
more than one might at first realize.7
References
Chandler and Helm (1984). ‘Developmental changes in the contribution of hsared
experience to social role-taking competence’, International Journal of Behavioural
Development 7, 145-154.
Dancy, J. (2011). ‘Acting in Ignorance’, Frontiers of Philosophy in China 6,345-357.
Doherty, M. (2009). Theory of Mind. Hove and New York: Psychology Press.
Gibbons, J. (2001). ‘Knowledge in Action’, Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research LXII, 579-600.
Gopnik, A. and Graf, (1988). ‘Knowing how you know — young children’s ability to
identify and remember the sources of their beliefs’, Child Development 59, 13661371.
7
I am grateful to Josef Perner for extensive knowledgeable help.
19
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