Philosophy

23 Topoi An International Review of Philosophy ISSN 0167-7411 Topoi DOI 10.1007/s11245-019-09651-8 An Anscombean Perspective on Habitual Action Annemarie Kalis & Dawa Ometto 1 23 Your article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution license which allows users to read, copy, distribute and make derivative works, as long as the author of the original work is cited. You may selfarchive this article on your own website, an institutional repository or funder's repository and make it publicly available immediately. Vol.:(0123456789) Topoi https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09651-8 An Anscombean Perspective on Habitual Action Annemarie Kalis1 * Dawa Ometto2 © The Author(s) 2019 Abstract Much of the time, human beings seem to rely on habits. Habits are learned behaviours directly elicited by context cues, and insensitive to short-term changes in goals: therefore they are sometimes irrational. But even where habitual responses are rational (contributing to current goal fulfillment), it can seem as if they are nevertheless not done for reasons. For, on a common understanding of habitual behaviour, agents' intentions do not play any role in the coming about of such responses. This paper discusses under what conditions we can say that habitual responses are, after all, done for reasons. We show how the idea that habitual behaviour cannot be understood as 'acting for reasons' stems from a widely but often implicitly held theoretical framework: the causal theory of action. We then propose an alternative, Anscombean understanding of intentional action, which can account for habitual responses being done for reasons. Keywords Habits * Reasons * Automaticity * Anscombe * Causalism 1 Introduction In our everyday lives, we usually do not need much deliberation in order to get things done. For the most part, we make coffee, commute to work, interact with others, and prepare meals without any need for explicit, step-by-step reasoning regarding what to do next. In other words: for most of our everyday behaviour, we rely on our habits. In psychology, habits are usually defined as "learned automatic responses with specific features" (Wood and Rünger 2016). They are directly elicited by context cues, and they are insensitive to short-term changes in goals. To give an example of the first feature: once you have got into the habit of going for a run every morning at 9 AM, you will unthinkingly reach for your running shoes as soon as the clock shows it to be 9 AM. The environmental stimulus is all that is needed to start off the habitual response. The feature of insensitivity manifests itself in the fact that you might automatically reach for your running shoes at the usual time even if you for example seriously injured your knee the day before. But even though habitual behaviours thus seem to be 'unreflective' in some sense, they often seem to be intentional in the sense that many habits clearly bear an important relation to our long-term goals and plans. This paradox raises the question that will be the topic of this paper: are habitual behaviours guided by goals and intentions, and under what conditions does such guidance allow us to say that our habitual responses are done for reasons? This comes down to the question: can habitual behaviours be actions?1 Before we can address this question systematically, we need to clarify how we define habits. Even though the psychological definition of habitual behaviour is widely * Annemarie Kalis firstname.lastname@example.com * Dawa Ometto email@example.com 1 Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands 2 Institut für Philosophie, Universität Leipzig, Beethovenstrasse 15, 04107 Leipzig, Germany 1 We use the term 'action' to refer to behaviours that are intentional under some description, and that can be explained in terms of reasons (Anscombe 1957; Davidson 1963). We leave aside the complex question whether everything we do intentionally is done for reasons: Hursthouse for example argues that some expressions of emotion (throwing a malfunctioning can opener agains the wall in frustration, Hursthouse (1991)) are intentional in the sense that the agent knows what she is doing, even though she cannot explain her behaviour in terms of reasons. On the other hand, Knobe and Kelly (2009) use experimental philosophical methods to show that we sometimes take agents to have reasons for doing something they did not intentionally do. Even though these are important challenges, we do not go into them here: in this paper we will defend the more limited claim that a substantial subset of habitual behaviours is both intentional and done for reasons. A. Kalis, D. Ometto 1 3 accepted, it has been criticized from various perspectives. Especially the idea that habits are inflexible responses has encountered serious criticism. Quite recently, Turner and Cacciatori (2016) have argued that psychology almost exclusively focuses on so-called 'automatic habits' which are indeed characterized by inflexibility. However, they argue that three additional forms of habitual behaviour can be identified. First of all, so-called skillful habits (such as sports routines) are actually highly flexible with regard to variations in context. Think of basketball players, who must continuously tune their movements to the changing situation on the field.2 Secondly, some habits are contested in that agents actively exert self-control in order to control or suppress the habitual behaviour (Adriaanse et al. 2010; Quinn et al. 2010). Even if the habitual response itself is still automatic and inflexible (as pointed out in (Orbell and Verplanken 2015), it suggests that habits are not in principle insusceptible to self-control and deliberation. And thirdly, sometimes habits even seem to be both flexible and what Turner and Cacciatori (2016) call infused by deliberation, in that the agent can employ deliberative capacities in order to actively support or guide the performance of habitual behaviour in different situations. Turner and Cacciatori argue that acknowledging the role of skillful, contested, and infused habits is crucial for understanding habitual behaviours of individuals and groups. More in general, their account can be seen as a call for a widening of the traditional psychological conception of habit. In order to do justice to these critical discussions, we here adopt a wider notion of habits as behavioural responses that do not depend on explicit deliberation, working memory or effort for their manifestation, thus leaving room for nonautomatic habits. Habitual behaviour is generally seen as the default mode of responding (Aarts and Dijksterhuis 2000; Arpaly 2000; Bargh and Chartrand 1999; Wood et al. 2014): we rely on our habits unless the situation requires us to overrule them by explicit deliberation and self-control. This interpretation builds on familiar dual-process models of cognition of the 'default-interventionist' kind, according to which cognition generally operates via Type 1 processes (that are automatic in the sense of not requiring working memory) unless the agent responds to situational demands by initiating cognitively more 'expensive' Type 2 processing (demanding working memory and some form of cognitive decoupling, (Evans and Stanovich 2013)). Even though such reliance on habitual responses is generally taken to be highly adaptive (Cosmides and Tooby 1996; Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier 2011; Oaksford and Chater 2007), the insensitivity of habitual responses to current changes in goals and expected outcome still raises important questions concerning human rationality. Even though habits themselves might be adaptive, changes in situation can make concrete manifestations of habits irrational. An often-used example is the story of a group of Soviet soldiers on a secret mission in Cuba who, upon landing, unthinkingly marched away in perfect formation (Allison 1971; Turner and Cacciatori 2016). The soldiers' response is instrumentally irrational because even if the response contributed to goal-fulfillment at their military home base (being a good soldier requires marching in formation), it does not contribute to -in fact even undermines- the fulfillment of their current goal of remaining undercover abroad. Such instrumental irrationality can occur because habitual responses are not elicited by the agent's current goal states or intentions, but by environmental cues (Ji and Wood 2007; Neal et al. 2012; Neal et al. 2011). If the latter is the defining characteristic of habitual action, this may seem to suggest that even rational habitual responses (thus responses that contribute to current goal fulfillment) do not seem to be done for reasons: after all, agents' current goals or intentions do not seem to play any relevant role in the coming about of such responses (Makowski 2017). Such worries bring us to the main question of this paper: under what conditions can we say that our habitual responses are done for reasons? In the next section, we will first set the stage by discussing how habitual responses are usually understood as forms of intentional action. We will show how a widely but often implicitly held theoretical framework (the causal theory of action) seems to lead to the conclusion that habitual action, even though it prima facie appears to be intentional, cannot be understood as 'acting for reasons'. In the next section we will then proceed to develop an alternative understanding of intentional action, and show how such a perspective can account for habitual responses being done for reasons. 2 Habitual Behaviour: Done for Reasons? Habitual behaviour is generally taken to be intentional or goal-directed in at least an indirect sense. After all, we usually develop a certain habit because we are trying to attain a certain goal (Arpaly 2000; Anderson 1982; Wood and Neal 2007), and manifestations of that habit can thus be seen as being directed towards the achievement of that goal. For example, the habit of reaching for one's running shoes at a certain time of the day has been acquired because for the person in question, running is a goal. Over time and repeated exercise, the idea is, this goal-directed response becomes so automated that at some point it is directly elicited by 2 This form of habituality has received growing attention in so-called 4E approaches to cognition (Dreyfus 2002; Hutto 2005; Varela et al. 2017), which emphasize the fact that much of everyday behaviour is embedded, embodied, extended and enactive. An Anscombean Perspective on Habitual Action 1 3 the relevant cues without any reliance on working memory, explicit deliberation or control. Whereas some argue that habitual behaviour should be understood as a form of automatic goal pursuit (Arpaly 2000; Wood and Neal 2007), others object that because habitual responses are insensitive to current goals, habitual behaviour is only derivatively goaldirected (Wood and Rünger 2016). But however conceived, the connection between habitual behaviour and goals distinguishes it from other forms of automatic processes such as preconscious perceptual processing, which is not aimed towards a goal in any sense (Bargh and Chartrand 1999, pp. 463–4). Whereas most psychologists and philosophers seem to agree that habitual responses are goal-directed in the sense discussed above, it is generally thought that such responses are not brought about by intentions (Railton 2009). As already mentioned, the psychological literature suggests that strongly habitual responses are heavily 'underpredicted' by motivational states such as goals and intentions, as they are directly elicited by environmental cues (Ji and Wood 2007; Neal et al. 2012, 2011). This has led to the philosophical worry that it might not be possible to say that such responses are done for reasons (Brownstein 2014; Makowski 2017). Brownstein (2014) suggests that it is in fact paradigmatic for habitual behaviour that agents cannot explain, or can only falsely explain, why they do what they do: the reasons they provide should be seen as post hoc rationalizations, as they do not track the causal processes that led to the behavioural response. However, the conclusion that habitual behaviours are not done for reasons seems prima facie puzzling. As Turner & Cacciatori (2016) have argued (see the introduction), it seems that much of our everyday behavior that is not preceded by explicit deliberation is nevertheless 'infused' with rationality: not every case of habitual behaviour seems to be a case of automatic behaviour, in the sense of being fully "mindless" or completely blind to our reasons. The case of our agent reaching for her running shoes, for example, still intuitively seems like a case of intentional action: the response is different from a mere reflex movement. In the remainder of this section we will argue that this difficulty about understanding habits as 'acting for reasons' arises from the familiar assumption that behaviour is done for reasons only in so far as it is caused by reasons (in other words, the assumption of causalism, or the causal theory of action). Building on a Humean tradition, causal accounts of action have been developed by, e.g., Donald Davidson (1963) and Michael Smith (1994). In psychology, the approach has become most widely known in the form of Michael Bratman's belief–desire–intention model (Bratman 1987; Bratman et al. 1988). In the BDI-model, agents weigh different reasons for action on the basis of their goals: the reason that comes out strongest subsequently causes the formation of a corresponding intention, and this intention in turn causes the corresponding action.3 This approach to action explanation has become widely popular in both cognitive science and various approaches to artificial intelligence. It shares important assumptions with traditional functionalism, which also builds on the idea that mental states should be defined in terms of their causal role in the mental architecture (Armstrong 1981; Fodor 1975). It is easy to observe that almost all psychological literature on the role of goals and intentions in habitual behaviour starts from such a causalist/ functionalist assumption: if goals and intentions have a role to play in habitual behaviour, their role should be a causal one. For example, Neal et al. (2012) distinguish between the 'inferred' or 'perceived' role of goals on behaviour and their 'actual' role, which is their effective causal contribution, measured in terms of cognitive associations (2012, p. 493, see also Wood & Rünger 2016, p11.15). Now, how does such a causalist framework raise doubts regarding the question whether habitual responding is 'acting for reasons'? The answer is simple. Firstly, dual-process approaches to cognition suggest that behaviour is caused by reasons in so far as it is caused by a process of deliberation: conscious consideration and weighing of reasons (Chan 1995; Korsgaard 2009). Such deliberation is characterized as typical Type 2 processing: it is time-consuming, effortful, and relies on working memory and cognitive control (Arpaly and Schroeder 2012; Makowski 2017). However, as described in the introduction, habitual responses result from Type 1 processing that precisely does not rely on working memory and cognitive control (Wood et al. 2014; Wood and Rünger 2016). From the perspective of a causalist approach to action explanation, this suggests that habitual behaviour is precisely not the kind of behaviour that can be explained by referring to any deliberative process involving reasons as causal factors. So when looked at from the perspective of dual-process models of cognition, a causalist approach to action explanation seems to suggest that 'acting for reasons' stands opposed to 'responding habitually'. Acting for reasons is defined as activity in which a deliberative process plays a causal role, and as such is caused by Type 2 processes that are categorically different from the kind of processes (Type 1) that instigate habitual responses. 3 The basic structure of explaining actions through the intermediate step of intention formation was already conceived by Davidson (1971), in an attempt to improve on his previous account in which an action explanation directly refers to an agent's beliefs and desires. A. Kalis, D. Ometto 1 3 3 Prior Attempts to Create Room for Habitual Actions Within the paradigm inspired by the causal theory of action, there have been various attempts by authors to show how habitual behaviour could nevertheless be seen as action done for reasons. Recent examples include Railton (2009), Arpaly and Schroeder (2012), and Velleman (2008).4 In this section we will discuss their proposals and show that they lead to problems stemming from their more or less tacit assumption of the causalist paradigm. These authors agree with us that behaviours we are typically inclined to call habitual are in an important sense different from mere mindless behavior. As Railton (2009, p. 98) puts it: "Far from being merely swept along by a causal chain or robotically enacting a habit or routine, the jazz improviser and skilled basketball player, for example, are exercising agency in a pure form, fully deploying their cognitive and creative skills." That is: Railton agrees that there is a sense in which these behaviours are both habitual and done for reasons. But he (and the other authors mentioned above) attempt to explain this from within the causalist paradigm. The strategy they employ to reconcile the notion of habituality with that of acting for a reason is to argue that acting for reasons does not, after all, require conscious deliberation. They suggest that what it is to act for a reason just is for one's action to be caused by certain mental states and processes. However, they argue, the relevant states and processes may simply be unconscious, and need not figure in any deliberation of the agent's. What is essential to behaviour being done for a reason is just that there is a rationalizing relation between the relevant mental state (say, the goal to go running) and the behaviour in question (say, reaching for one's running shoes), and that the mental state is the (unconscious) cause of the behaviour. For example, Arpaly argues that an agent can be said to act for a reason in so far as the mechanism causing the behaviour is responsive to reasons in a very minimal sense, namely in the sense that it is "the result or the embodiment of an awareness, inaccessible at the moment to his deliberation" of what is good about the behaviour (Arpaly 2000, p. 503). And Railton argues that, in order for it to be possible that automatic or habitual responses of the kind described above (the saxophone player's solo, the skilled driver's maneuvers, or our agent's habitual reaching for her running shoes) are done for a reason, "there must exist non-deliberative causal psychic processes 'of the right kind' to be aptly responsive to a given consideration as such, and aptly expressive of one's identity or values, even in the face of competing interests" (Railton 2009, p. 104).5 Although we believe there is something right about these attempts to do justice to the phenomenon of habitual action, we believe that there are important difficulties with the proposed causalist solution in terms of unconscious causation. First, there is the initial problem that it is unclear what epistemic right the causalist has to postulate the existence of unconscious beliefs and intentions (or other mental states or processes). Given that they are unconscious, how are we to know that they are present, exactly in those problematic cases of habitual or automatic behaviour that we intuitively still want to describe as intentional? Given the claim from empirical psychology that much of our everyday behavior might actually not be done for reasons, that may seem like a mere ad hoc move. But even if we grant the causalist the hypothesis that there are such unconscious mechanisms at play precisely in those cases that we intuitively want to describe as happening for reasons, we argue, there remains a deeper problem with this strategy to reconcile causalism with the idea that habitual behaviours happen for reasons. As we have just seen, Railton interestingly included the clause that the unconscious processes that explain habitual behaviour must be 'of the right kind'. What does this mean? Clearly, the clause is intended to exclude the possibility of so-called deviant causal chains. For, as Railton insists, the habitual responses under consideration "are clearly done for reasons, and, moreover, for reasons as such (rather than, say, through a deviant causal path)". We agree that what is needed to understand the sense in which the habitual responses under consideration are not 'merely mindless' is how they can be done for reasons 'as such'. That is, it is not enough that there is some explanatory link between the agent's reasons (i.e., her desires or 'proattitudes', broadly speaking) and her action: if the agent's reasons would cause her behaviour merely accidentally, then we would still not be able to view the behaviour as rational in the required sense. And such an accidental link between mental states and behaviour is precisely what seems to be present in the famous cases of deviant causal chains, which are frequently discussed as a threat to the entire causal theory of action. It will be helpful to consider the famous example of a deviant causal chain developed by Davidson himself: A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This belief and 5 We return to the meaning of Railton's crucial appeal to "the right kind" of process below. 4 But also see, for example, Arpaly 2000; Bermúdez (2017); Christensen et al. 2016; DeSouza (2013). An Anscombean Perspective on Habitual Action 1 3 want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his hold. (Davidson 1973, p. 79). There is, of course a large and still growing body of literature on the question how much of a problem the possibility of deviance is for the causalist paradigm, and on whether it is possible to define the required right causal connection between mental states and behaviour. Here, however, our aim is not to answer the question whether there is, ultimately, a way out of the problem of deviant causal chains. What we will point out below is merely that there is a tension between the strategies that causalists adopt for dealing with the problem of habitual actions on the one hand, and the general strategies available for circumventing deviant causal chains on the other. For the latter strategies appeal to precisely those features that Railton, Arpaly, and others insist must be absent in the case of habitual behaviour: the agent's consciousness and deliberation. To see this, consider Davidson's own initial diagnosis of what is missing in the climber case. He observes that in the 'right' cases, the attitudes that constitute an agent's reasons cause the action "through a course of practical reasoning", whereas in e.g. the climber scenario, this is precisely not the case. Davidson is famously sceptical about the possibility of giving a general account of the conditions under which reason-states cause the action in the right way, i.e. "through a course of practical reasoning". Other defenders of the causal theory of action are more optimistic about this, offering at least partial analyses of when a causal chain involving reason-states constitutes a piece of practical reasoning: for instance, by insisting that the agent's attitudes concern not only the desired end result of his action, but also the more or less precise way in which this result is to be achieved (i.e., the action must be caused by a state representing the agent's plan for action)-that is, by insisting that the agent represents his means as such. Others argue that the attitudes that cause the action must somehow be represented or endorsed by the agent as reasons for action (Schlosser 2012): the agent's reasons must, e.g., include a reference to themselves, such that the agent is moved by a desire not just to do A, but to do A because of this very desire.6 But however the causalist wishes to spell out the relevant details, it seems clear that these definitions of the "right" kind of causal chain, understood as a definition of when causation by reason-states constitutes "a course of practical reasoning", will not be met by habitual behaviour as e.g. Railton construes it. For Railton stipulates that agents responding habitually are not conscious of the reasons' causal efficacy, that they do not engage in practical deliberation, and that they do not choose or endorse their reasons as reasons (Railton 2009 p. 102).7 In the face of this, how can it still be maintained that in such cases their behaviour is explained by reasons 'as such'? Authors like Railton may claim that it is simply evident that habitual behaviour such as the musician's sax-playing, or our agent's reaching for her running shoes, happen for reasons. Now, as we have explained, we agree with this assessment. But if we respect the distinction between behaviour merely being caused by a reason, and its happening for a reason 'as such', or for a reason qua reason, it is not enough to be told that habitual behaviours are produced by unconscious mechanisms. What needs to be shown is that such mechanisms, that are said to produce habitual behaviours entirely behind the agent's back, nevertheless constitute causal chains of the 'right' kind. And as the brief diagnosis of cases of deviance provided above indicates, there is reason to be sceptical about that claim: consciousness and deliberation, in some sense, seem to be required to rule out that the connection between an agent's reasons and her behaviour is merely accidental. We take this to be an important lesson to be learned from the causalist attempt to account for automaticity. While we agree with e.g. Railton's assessment of the intuitively habitual or automatic responses under discussion here as not merely mindless behaviour, but as intentional, it seems that we cannot explain this on the assumption that the efficacy of the agent's reasons happens entirely outside the purview of the agent's consciousness. What is needed is to explain in which sense agents do have their ends or reasons 'before their minds', even when they respond habitually-while respecting the fact that such behaviour is precisely characterised by the absence of explicit prior deliberation. We suggest that to do justice to this point and to understand habitual action, it is necessary to take a step back from the causalist framework. 4 Acting for Reasons and the Question 'Why' We have argued that there is serious pressure on the commonsense idea that at least some of our habitual behaviours are intentional and happen for reasons. This pressure stems, on the one hand, from empirical psychology-which 6 We return to a version of this idea that a form of endorsement or consciousness of one's reasons as reasons (i.e., of their motivational force for the agent) is required for intentional action in section 3. 7 Although we wll not labour the point here, it seems intuitive that these two conditions-the absence of consciousness of the causal efficacy of one's reasons, and the absence of practical deliberation- are really just two aspects of the same condition. For recent literature on reasoning or deliberation in general argues that the difference between a mere train of thought (such as occurs in the climber's mind) and a course of reasoning consists precisely in the agent's awareness that the former thought constitutes her ground for drawing the conclusion. For a discussion of this so-called "taking condition", see, e.g., Kietzmann (2018). A. Kalis, D. Ometto 1 3 suggests that an agent's prior attitudes and her prior deliberation are not relevant to explaining habitual responses-and on the other, from the causalist paradigm in the philosophy of action-which, pace e.g. Railton, seems wedded to making the presence of such prior deliberation and attitudes a necessary condition of behaviour happening for reasons (or for reasons 'as such'). In this section, we wish to suggest that it is possible to rescue the commonsense insight that habitual or automatic behaviour happens for reasons (and are thus not completely mindless) by showing that there is another way to understand what it means to 'act for reasons'-an approach which does not rely on the causalist/functionalist approach to action explanation. In particular, the approach we have in mind8 rejects the following two assumptions, which, as we can now see, generate the difficulty concerning the possibility of habitual action: A Practical deliberation is an event or process that necessarily occurs prior to the action which is explained by it. B An agent's consciousness or awareness of her reasons for acting must be an occurrent episode, in the sense of being in the forefront of her mind, and thus requiring a certain form of attention or effort. The alternative tradition in the philosophy of action which rejects these assumptions is primarily represented by Elizabeth Anscombe (1957), but has in recent times received much renewed attention, and has been further developed by, e.g., Moran (2004), Thompson (2008), Marcus (2012) and Lavin (2013). Roughly, the idea behind these accounts is that intentional action is action of which agents know that they are doing it and why: they can answer the so-called "why-question", or the "Anscombean question", as Railton (2009) calls it. However, and crucially, answers to that question should not be seen as reports on any preceding internal processes (let alone processes involving deliberation over reasons): instead, they should be understood as manifestations of a form of practical knowledge, or insight into the goal-directed structure of one's actions. As we will argue, this offers a different perspective on habitual action: in so far as agents have practical knowledge of the goal-directed structure of their habitual behaviour, such behaviour can be both seen as intentional and as 'done for reasons'. The guiding thought behind Anscombe's account is that intentional action is action to which a certain sense of the question "Why?" is applicable. Intentional action, Anscombe's thought is, is the kind of behavior for which it makes sense to expect the agent to be able to give an explanation. And the relevant sense of the question "Why?" is, of course, the sense in which it is a demand for the agent's reason for action. Anscombe, and philosophers of action who follow her, argue that the required elucidiation of the relevant sense of the question "Why?" can be found by seeing that agents have a certain kind of knowledge of the answer (when they are indeed acting intentionally). This kind of knowledge can be negatively characterized as "knowledge without observation". Positively, we can say that such knowledge is practical knowledge. We will now briefly explain both points by examining four hallmarks of such agential knowledge. Anscombe argues that the question "Why are you doing A?" does not have application when the agent does not know that she is doing A.9 For imagine an agent who, being asked why she is ringing the doorbell, answers: "'Good heavens! I didn't know I was ringing it!'" (p. 51)-for example, the agent was unwittingly leaning against the doorbell. In such a case, the demand for a reason is obviously ill posed, and so the behaviour is not intentional. But, Anscombe continues, the question is equally refused application if the agent does know that she is doing A, but only because she observes herself to be doing it. For example, suppose the agent from our example notices that she is, in fact, ringing the doorbell by leaning against it. Then again, she is obviously not in a position to answer the question why she is doing that, in the relevant sense. As Wittgenstein says, the mark of intentional action is the absence of surprise10: when we do something intentionally, we do not need to observe ourselves doing it in order to know that we are doing it. And in so far as we do observe something we do intentionally, this will not surprise us: when one intends to raise one's arm, the observation of one's arm rising does not come as something unexpected. Furthermore, the same would hold if our agent would know that she is ringing the doorbell, but only because she reasons 9 It is important to note that the agent only has (and needs to have) knowledge of what she is doing under the descriptions under which her behaviour is intentional: that is, she may know that she is doing A (ringing the doorbell), but be ignorant of at least some of the precise movements her arm is making as she does so. 10 Of course, sometimes we are surprised by our habitual actions, as when we realize that we are reaching for our running shoes even though we have an injury. However, this does not preclude habitual behaviour from being intentional: in such cases, the agent is not surprised to find out she is reaching for her shoes, for she knows that without observation. What she is surprised about, it seems, is the context in which she performs this action, which she recalls when she remembers that she can't go running because of the injury. 8 In this paper we do not provide independent arguments for why Anscombe's approach to action explanation is a valuable one. Our argument may thus be read in conditional terms: in so far as her approach is fruitful, it can account for habitual behaviour being intentional and done for reasons. Of course, we do believe that there are good reasons for preferring the Anscombean view to competing views: we have argued for this point elsewhere (Ometto 2016; Ometto and Kalis 2018). An Anscombean Perspective on Habitual Action 1 3 "Someone is ringing the doorbell; I am the only one near the doorbell; therefore I must be ringing it". So we can say that, in order for the question "Why are you doing A?" to be applicable, and so in order for A to be an intentional action, the agent must know that she is doing A without observation (and without inference: she does not conclude that she is acting intentionally based on, say, her noticing that she has a desire to do A and finding that she is in appropriate conditions to do A). Second, and relatedly, the question "Why?" is refused application if the agent fails to realize that it is she herself that is doing A. That is, it is not enough that she knows that, say, someone is doing A: for example, if she thinks "the one who is ringing the doorbell is waking the baby", then neither ringing the bell nor waking the baby will be an intentional action of hers. Rather, her knowledge must be first-personal: i.e., it must be knowledge of what she would express, by using a first-person pronoun, as "I am doing A". According to Anscombe's account, intentional action must be thus be understood as essentially self-conscious: an agent is, in a sense to be understood, not at a distance from her action, so that she does not need to observe or infer that she herself is doing it. That is why, e.g., Davidson's climber (see Sect. 2) is not acting intentionally: for him, the awareness that he is letting go of the rope because he is nervous is at best a realization or discovery, to which he is a passive bystander. Third, it is important to note that an agent's knowledge of what she doing is paradigmatically not just of the fact that she is doing A, but rather of the fact that she is doing A because she is doing B, which is itself an intentional action.11 So the agent's knowledge will be, for instance, "I'm chopping onions because I'm making risotto". This is why the kind of knowledge without observation that we have of what we are doing intentionally can be called practical knowledge: in the central case, it is knowledge of the means-ends structure of one's action.12 Consider this chain of questions and answers to the Anscombean question: "Why are you grabbing the onion?" (A) – "I'm cutting some onions" (B). "Why are you cutting some onions?" (B) – "I'm making risotto" (C). "Why are you making risotto?" (C) – "I'm preparing a Christmas dinner" (D). Practical knowledge, as Anscombe argues, comprises this whole structure: the agent knows that she is doing A because she is doing B, which she is doing because of C, which in turn she is doing because she is doing D. Equally, she therefore knows that she is doing A because she is doing D. Finally, this means that practical knowledge is present throughout the agent's performance of her action. While she is cutting the onions, she knows that she is doing this because she is making risotto. And if she then grabs an extra onion from the kitchen cupboard, she will equally know that she is doing this (grabbing the onion) because she is cutting onions in order to make a risotto. On this view, there thus does not need to be a prior process of thinking ("I need to grab an onion for the risotto") before the agent initiates the action. What makes the action a goal-directed performance is that the agent knows, as she is extending her arms to the cupboard, that this movement is part of a larger intentional action of hers.13 11 There is an imporant exception to this. Anscombe argues that the chain of answers to the question "Why?" that we discuss below must come to an end somewhere, in what she calls a "desirability characterization" (Anscombe 1957, pp. 70–72). Answering the question "Why are you doing that?" by saying, for instance, "It's healthy", will not invite a further question as to why one wants to be healthy. An agent's knowledge of this ultimate answer to the question "Why?" is thus not of the form "I'm doing A because ...". The difference between practical knowledge of such desirability characterizations and lower-level descriptions of action is an interesting topic that we cannot, unfortunately, address here. 12 We have already indicated the exception of practical knowledge of desirability characterizations in footnote 11. Moreover, Anscombe (1957, p. 20) also considers non-instrumental answers to the question "Why?", such as backward-looking motives ("I did it because he killed my brother"). We do not want to deny that agents can have practical knowledge of these. However, knowledge of means-ends relations is still central to Anscombe's account. This comes out in her remark that "the notion of 'practical knowledge' can only be understood if we first understand 'practical reasoning'" (Anscombe 1957, p. 57) (for which see below). In this paper, we focus on instrumental answers to the question "Why?", because they are most pertinent to cases of habitual behavior. 13 As Thompson (2011, p. 206) notes, the mark of this is that in "Anscombe's fundamental scene" the question "Why?" is addressed to the agent in the midst of her performance, in progressive aspect: the question is not "Why have you done A?", but rather "Why are you doing A?". Thompson's point is not to deny that the question "Why?"can be asked in the perfective, but to emphasize the priority of the fact that the agent also has practical knowledge "in medias res" (p. 209). Intention for the future and apparently instantaneous actions may appear to pose a difficulty for the claim that practical knowledge is essentially of an ongoing action. Although we do not wish to take a side on these matters here, see Moran and Stone (2011) for an argument that future intention, too, must be understood on Thompson's model. For our purposes, all that matters is that in cases of habitual action, the agent has practical knowledge throughout her acting, and need not have consciously deliberated prior to acting. A. Kalis, D. Ometto 1 3 On the Anscombean view of action, what it is to perform an intentional action (doing A) is thus to understand what one is doing as contributing to one's aims ("I am doing A because I am doing B"). The concept of an intentional action, then, is essentially the concept of a kind of behavior that makes sense to the agent as her action. An intentional action is action that is, therefore, partially constituted by the agent's point of view, or her own take on what she is doing. According to the Anscombean view, this, and not an appeal to special mental causes, is what distinguishes between intentional action and mere behaviour.14 Naturally, this Anscombean account of practical knowledge and intentional action requires much further development, which we cannot undertake in this paper. But because it is so central to the Anscombean approach that an intentional action is understood by the agent herself, and therefore makes sense to her as contributing to her goals, it provides a fruitful way of thinking about precisely the cases of habitual or automatic responses that we have been considering. For, e.g., in cases such as that of our agent who habitually reaches for her running shoes, the reason why we intuitively want to classify this as an intentional action (and not a completely mindless happening) is precisely that doing what she does makes sense to the agent (Makowski 2017). And from the perspective we have been presenting in this chapter, that may be all that is needed for the behaviour in question to be intentional: the agent has practical knowledge that she is reaching for her shoes in order to go running. Moreover, the Anscombean suggests that practical reasoning just is knowing the relation between means and ends in this way. This comes out in the fact that the chain of "Why?" questions and answers in the A-D series above can equally be traversed in the opposite direction: rather than beginning by asking the agent "Why are you doing A?", we can begin with asking "How are you doing D?", to which she can reply "by doing C"-and so on. In knowing that she is doing A because she is doing B, the agent simultaneously knows that B is her means to doing A. Practical reasoning and practical knowledge are thus, as it were, two sides of the same coin. On this view, practical reasoning is thus not an occurrent process which takes place before the action begins. Rather, practical reasoning is an awareness of what constitutes means to one's ends that, as we have seen, is constitutive of the action in question. As such, it is an awareness that is manifested in, and thus lasts throughout, the agent's performance of the action. But doesn't the Anscombean view overestimate the extent to which agents are able to give true explanations of their intentional actions? The empirical literature seems to abound with examples which seem to suggest that an agent's answer to the question "Why?" is often just a post hoc rationalization, or a confabulation. This may especially seem to be so in the case of habitual behaviour. Brownstein (2014), for instance, suggests that empirical evidence supports this view with regard to at least highly skilled actions in sports (basketball, in the case at issue): Confabulation is common when skilled agents are asked to report the techniques they use "on the field." For instance [...] players who successfully catch objects falling at an accelerating rate report that those objects are falling at a constant speed. These individuals are confabulating reasons based in naïve physics when they are asked why they are moving to the spot where the accelerating object is? (Brownstein 2014, p. 560). Notice, however, that the kind of explanation Brownstein is here taking to be the player's answer to the "Anscombean question"-namely, "the ball is falling at constant speed"- is not actually the kind of consideration that the Anscombean claims to fall under the scope of the agent's practical knowledge. For it is obviously not the kind of thing that an agent could know without observation: it is not even a candidate for a reason for action, on the Anscombean view. So the fact that agents speculate or confabulate about the physical properties of the ball does not show that the behaviour is not intentional according to the Anscombean's criteria. For that to be the case, it would have to be shown that the agent was not aware of the following fact: that she was moving to spot X on the pitch in order to catch the ball. Nothing in Brownstein's example suggests that this is the case, and indeed, it seems obvious that the basketball player does know this as she is moving down the pitch. If we are thus attentive to what the Anscombean is claiming to the be the object of an agent's practical knowledge-namely, the means-ends structure of her ongoing action-it will seem far less convincing that agents' account of this structure could be, in general, mere confabulation. After all, on the Anscombean account, what an agent can truly be said to be doing intentionally depends on what she takes herself to be doing. Instead, what the confabulation literature shows is that agents provide many causal explanations of their actions that turn out to be 14 This is not to deny that causation is important to understanding intentional action. As Anscombe (1957, p. 87) says, practical knowledge is "the cause of what it understands" (i.e., of the action). Although this should be first and foremost understood in terms of formal causation (meaning that, as we explain below, the knowledge is constitutive of the action), this is compatible with holding that practical knowledge is also a cause in the sense of being "a necessary condition of the production of various results" (Anscombe 1957, p. 87-88). However, as some contemporary Anscombeans have argued, this kind of causation cannot be understood in terms of "ordinary" (as Davidson (1963) calls it) causation by prior mental causes: rather, the agent's understanding of what she is doing rationally guides her movements throughout the unfolding of the action. The relevant notion of causation is developed and defended, e.g., by Marcus (2012). An Anscombean Perspective on Habitual Action 1 3 faulty. So whereas Anscombe's view leaves room for a lot of self-deception and failing self-insight in human agents-it does not leave room for agents being mistaken about the means-end structure of their own actions. This is because, on the Anscombean picture, action is defined in terms of this kind of practical knowledge. This also shows how Anscombe's view would respond to the well-known examples from empirical psychology in which it seems as if agents are actually unaware of the 'true' reasons for which they act, such as the famous Nisbett & Wilson pantyhose experiment (Nisbett and Wilson 1977), in which agents seem to confabulate reasons for picking one of a number of identical pantyhoses. The Anscombean response would be that even though there is certainly confabulation going on here, what is confabulated is not the means-end structure of the participants' behaviour (in this case, their choosing one particular pantyhose). Their assignment was to choose the pantyhose they considered to be of the best quality, and this is what they did and what they said they did: they chose the pantyhose they considered to be of the best quality. What participants could not accurately report upon was the psychological factors that explained why they chose the one they did (given that they were all of identical quality). As Sandis (2015) aptly remarks: "What we are fabricating in such as case is not a tale about our agential reasons but one about the quality of the stockings" (p.270). The results of such experiments thus do not seem to stand in opposition to the Anscombean theory. It may be that the reasons cited by the agent are actually bad reasons (i.e., there actually are no differences between the objects of choice), but they are still her reasons, i.e. the reasons for which she picked the one over the other. The idea that 'the real reason' for choosing a certain pantyhose was an nonconscious preference for objects placed in a certain position (the psychological explanation) only makes sense within a causalist paradigm where 'one's reason' is defined as the preference that caused one's action. The Anscombean proposal thus differs from the attempted solution to the problem of the intentionality of habitual responses offered by, e.g., Railton in Sect. 2 in the following way. Railton and others in the causalist framework are forced to postulate unconscious states of intention (or other pro-attitudes). And because they conceive of practical reasoning as an occurrent train of thought prior to the action, it follows immediately that these unconscious states cannot be part of practical reasoning. By contrast, the Anscombean can hold on to the idea that a form of consciousness-practical knowledge-is essential to acting. But such consciousness does not need to consist in the presence of some occurrent train of thought prior to action. Rather, it is knowledge of the point of the action, as the agent conceives of it. Part of what stands in the way of accepting this suggestion is, perhaps, an overly "intellectualist"15 conception of knowledge, as if knowing consists in occurrently having a thought before one's mind. Brownstein (2014), perhaps, betrays this tendency when he writes that being able to answer the Anscombean question requires "thinking propositional thoughts about where your body should be or what it should be doing" (p. 558), and when he then complains that the effort of thinking such thoughts can only distract the agent from what she is doing. Against this conception, we should note that we need not think that knowledge, in general, consists in occurrently having a proposition before one's mind: everyone knows facts that they do not have occurrently before their minds. And in particular, we should note that when it comes to selfknowledge, such a picture of having a proposition occurrently before one's mind seems mistaken: in general, one does not need to contemplate the fact that one has a certain belief in order to know that one has it.16 After all, when one thinks that p, one does not need to contemplate any further facts to know that "I think p". If the Anscombean claim that knowledge of what one does intentionally is a form of selfknowledge can be developed and defended, then it seems that we could understand how many of our actions can be habitual, in the sense of not requiring any prior deliberation, while at the same time being more than mindless behavior. We should emphasize that we do not deny that there may be cases of habitual behaviours of which an agent has no practical knowledge, and which are therefore unintentional. A case, frequently discussed in the empirical literature and already mentioned in the introduction, that comes to mind is that of the group of undercover soldies who upon arrival at their destination unthinkingly marched away in perfect formation. Arguably, they were not aware of marching in perfect formation-or at least, we suggest that whether or not this is a case of acting for reasons depends on whether they were able to answer the Anscombean question. However, it seems that many of the responses discussed in the literature as habitual (because there seems to be no occurrent process of prior deliberation) can be said to happen for reasons, given the Anscombean view. Automaticity, in the sense of lack of prior deliberation, need not imply lack of reasons on the agent's part. Indeed, we suggest that we may usefully distinguish between habits that are compatible with, and indeed arguably require, the presence of practical 15 In Ryle's (1949, chapter 2) sense. 16 Indeed, as has recently been argued by a number of authors who take their cue from Anscombe, to know that one believes that p, in the normal case, one does not have to focus one's attention on elements of one's psychology. Rather, what is required is to make up one's mind about whether p itself is true: the 'second-order' question whether one believes that p is 'transparent' to the 'first-order' question whether p. Compare Moran (2001) and Boyle (2011). A. Kalis, D. Ometto 1 3 knowledge on the agent's part, and habits that do not. These may constitute different species of the genus "habit", that require a different treatment in the philosophy of action, and perhaps in empirical psychology as well.17 5 A new look at self‐ascription of reasons and intentions in empirical psychology In the introduction we discussed Turner and Cacciatori's (2016) suggestion that most forms of habitual behaviour are much more flexible (in the sense of their being susceptible to goals and reasons) than is often held in the psychological literature. But as long as one holds on to the idea that reasons are causal processes that must take place prior to an action, the fact that habits are directly elicited by the environment seemed to exclude such flexibility. However, when we now look at Turner and Cacciatori's proposal from an Anscombean perspective, we can see that it allows for precisely the kind of flexibility Turner and Cacciatori suggest. The fact that habitual responses are initiated on the basis of environmental cues does leave ample room for practical knowledge: for the agents involved to know what they are doing and why. To clarify: from an Anscombean perspective, many of the empirical results we have discussed in Sect. 1 no longer seem threatening to the idea that habitual behaviour can be done for reasons. For, as we have seen, what seemed to threaten that idea was the fact that the agent's reported intentions prior to the response underpredicted what the agent would do. But on the Anscombean proposal, that need not undermine the intentionality of the habitual response: even if the agent has expressed the prior intention to quit running because of an injury, what matters is that she is able to answer the question "Why?" during the performance of her action: she should be able to answer the question: why are you putting on your running shoes? The point here is that in such cases, the habitual response of putting on one's running shoes is still intentional in the sense of it being done for the sake of going running. And in so far as the agent has practical knowledge, and thus can answer the question "why do you put on your running shoes?" by answering "I want to go running", the habitual behaviour is clearly done for a reason. If that answer contradicts a previously expressed intention, that is in itself an interesting result: maybe this indicates, for example, that agents frequently change their minds about what to do. It can also indicate (as the example hints at) that we are only reminded of our prior intentions when someone starts to question our actions. But however we want to explain that fact, it need not undermine the idea that the habitual response of putting on one's shoes was performed for reasons, as long as the agent was able to answer the Anscombean question while she was engaged in it. Also, the Anscombean account of 'acting for reasons' sheds new light on the results of self-reports concerning the role of goals and intentions in habitual behaviour. For example, Ji and Wood (2007) show that if people have strong habits, their behaviour is not best predicted by the strength or certainty of the intentions expressed, but by past behaviour. Based on such findings, Ji and Wood suggest that for people with strong habits, intentions might be epiphenomena (Ji and Wood 2007 p. 273). This confirms that they assume that in so far as the previously expressed intentions do not predict the relevant behaviour, they do not cause it, and therefore, on their view, such behaviour is not intentional at all. Neal et al. (2012) even think that this discontinuity between the perceived and actual role of such states shows "the need to study mechanisms of actual habitual control using methods that do not rely on introspection" (p.497). We believe the implicit reliance on a causalist way of thinking in the psychology of habits misrepresents the role of goals and intentions in habitual behaviour, and also misrepresents the status of self-reports of such states (namely, as reports of internal causal processes). As an alternative, the Anscombean framework we have outlined above offers the possibility to analyze self-reports of goals and intentions, not as reports on internal states with a causal functional role, but as manifestations of practical knowledge of the intentional structure of one's behaviour. Expressing one's intentions should be seen as engaging in a form of commitment, informed by one's goals. And in so far as one's subsequent actions correspond to such expressed intentions, this shows that these actions are done intentionally. This provides a much simpler explanation of the (to some) paradoxical fact that people with strong habits hold intentions with greater certainty, even though they "did not rely on these strongly held judgments to guide habitual behavior" (Ji and Wood 2007, p.273). All this is no longer paradoxical once one understands reports of goals and intentions as accounts of the 'sense' in our own behavioural patterns. We would say that people do rely on their intentions, but that guidance need not necessarily be interpreted as a causal chain from a prior mental state to an action: it can also be understood as practical knowledge shaping habitual action while it is unfolding. Funding Annemarie Kalis' research for this paper was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, NWO-VENI grant scheme, Grant No. 016.154.044. 17 Ryle's (1949, chapter 2) distinction between "intelligent capacities" and "habits" (although he reserves the word "habit" for the nonrational variety) seems to capture this idea of different species of a common genus of habit. Also see Annas (2011) for a development of the idea of species of habits to which thought or rationality is essential. An Anscombean Perspective on Habitual Action 1 3 Compliance with Ethical Standards Conflict of interest Annemarie Kalis declares that she has no conflict of interest. Dawa Ometto declares that he has no conflict of interest. Ethical Approval This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. References Aarts H, Dijksterhuis A (2000) Habits as knowledge structures: automaticity in goal-directed behavior. J Pers Soc Psychol 78(1):53–63 Adriaanse MA, Oettingen G, Gollwitzer PM, Hennes EP, De Ridder DT, De Wit JB (2010) When planning is not enough: fighting unhealthy snacking habits by mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII). Eur J Soc Psychol 40(7):1277–1293 Allison GT (1971) Essence of decision: explaining the Cuban missile crisis. Little Brown and company, Boston Anderson JR (1982) Acquisition of cognitive skill. Psychol Rev 89(4):369 Annas J (2011) Intelligent virtue. Oxford University Press, England Anscombe GEM (1957) Intention. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts Armstrong DM (1981) The causal theory of the mind. Mind and cognition: A reader. Blackwell, Oxford, pp 80–87 Arpaly N (2000) On acting rationally against one's best judgment*. Ethics 110(3):488–513 Arpaly N, Schroeder T (2012) Deliberation and acting for reasons. Philos Rev 121(2):209–239 Bargh JA, Chartrand TL (1999) The unbearable automaticity of being. Am Psychol 54(7):462 Bermúdez JP (2017) Do we reflect while performing skillful actions? Automaticity, control, and the perils of distraction. Philos Psychol 30(7):896–924 Boyle, Matthew (2011). 'Making up Your Mind' and the Activity of Reason. Philosophers' Imprint 11 Bratman ME (1987) Intention, plans, and practical reason. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Bratman ME, Israel DJ, Pollack ME (1988) Plans and resourcebounded practical reasoning. Comput Intell 4(3):349–355 Brownstein M (2014) Rationalizing flow: agency in skilled unreflective action. Philos Stud 168(2):545–568 Chan DK (1995) Non-Intentional Actions. Am Philos Quart 32(2):139–151 Christensen W, Sutton J, McIlwain DJ (2016) Cognition in skilled action: meshed control and the varieties of skill experience. Mind Lang 31(1):37–66 Cosmides L, Tooby J (1996) Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty. Cognition 58(1):1–73 Davidson D (1963) Actions, reasons, and causes. J Philos 60(23):685–700 Davidson D (ed) (1971) Agency. In: Essays on actions and events, 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 43–61 Davidson D (ed) (1973) Freedom to act. In: Essays on actions and events, 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 63–81 DeSouza N (2013) Pre-reflective ethical know-how. Ethical Theory Moral Pract 16(2):279–294 Dreyfus HL (2002) Intelligence without representation–MerleauPonty's critique of mental representation. The relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation. Phenomenol Cogn Sci 1(4):367–383 Evans JSB, Stanovich KE (2013) Dual-process theories of higher cognition: advancing the debate. Perspect Psychol Sci 8(3):223–241 Fodor JA (1975) The language of thought. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts Gigerenzer G, Gaissmaier W (2011) Heuristic decision making. Annu Rev Psychol 62:451–482 Hursthouse R (1991) Arational actions. J Philos 88(2):57–68 Hutto DD (2005) Knowing what? Radical versus conservative enactivism. Phenomenol Cogn Sci 4(4):389–405 Ji MF, Wood W (2007) Purchase and consumption habits: not necessarily what you intend. J Consum Psychol 17(4):261–276 Kietzmann C (2018) Inference and the taking condition. Ratio. https ://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12195 Knobe J, Kelly SD (2009) Can one act for a reason without acting intentionally? In: Sandis C (ed) New essays on the explanation of action. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp 169–183 Korsgaard, C. M. (2009). The activity of reason. In Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (Vol. 83, pp. 23–43) Lavin D (2013) Must there be basic action? Noûs 47(2):273–301 PT. Makowski (2017). Automaticity and the economization of actions. In Tadeusz Kotarbiński's action theory. Springer, Berlin. (pp. 153–184) Marcus E (2012) Rational causation. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts Moran R (2001) Authority and estrangement: an essay on self-knowledge. Princeton University Press, New Jersey Moran R (2004) Anscombe on 'practical knowledge'. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 55:43–68 Moran R, Stone M (2011) Anscombe on expression of intention. In: Ford A, Hornsby J, Stoutland F (eds) Essays on Anscombe's intention. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, pp 33–75 Neal DT, Wood W, Wu M, Kurlander D (2011) The pull of the past: when do habits persist despite conflict with motives? Pers Soc Psychol Bull 37(11):1428–1437 Neal DT, Wood W, Labrecque JS, Lally P (2012) How do habits guide behavior? Perceived and actual triggers of habits in daily life. J Exp Soc Psychol 48(2):492–498 Nisbett RE, Wilson TD (1977) Telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes. Psychol Rev 84(3):231 Oaksford M, Chater N (2007) Bayesian rationality: the probabilistic approach to human reasoning. Oxford University Press, Oxford Ometto DLA (2016) Freedom & self-knowledge. Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University Ometto D, Kalis A (2018) Neo-aristotelianism: virtue, habituation, and self-cultivation. In: Ethics and self-cultivation. Routledge, pp 143–161 Orbell S, Verplanken B (2015) The strength of habit. Health Psychol Rev 9(3):311–317. https ://doi.org/10.1080/17437 199.2014.99203 1 Quinn JM, Pascoe A, Wood W, Neal DT (2010) Can't control yourself? Monitor those bad habits. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 36(4):499–511 Railton P (2009) Practical competence and fluent agency. In: Sobel D, Wall S (eds) Reasons Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 81–115 Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. Routledge Sandis C (2015) Verbal reports and 'real'reasons: confabulation and conflation. Ethical Theor Moral Pract 18(2):267–280 A. Kalis, D. Ometto 1 3 Schlosser ME (2012) Taking something as a reason for action. Philosophical Papers 41(2):267–304 Smith MR (1994) The moral problem. Wiley, New Jersey Thompson, M (2008) Life and action. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts Thompson M (2011) Anscombe's intention and practical knowledge. In: Ford A, Hornsby J, Stoutland F (eds) Essays on Anscombe's intention. Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, pp 198–210 Turner SF, Cacciatori E (2016) The multiplicity of habits: Implications for routines research. In: Howard-Grenville J, Rerup C, Langley A, Tsoukas H (eds) Organizational routines: how they are created, maintained, and changed. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p 71 Varela FJ, Thompson E, Rosch E (2017) The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press, Massachusetts Wood W, Neal DT (2007) A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. Psychol Rev 114(4):843 Wood W, Rünger D (2016) Psychology of habit. Annu Rev Psychol 67:289–314 Wood W, Labrecque JS, Lin PY, Rünger D (2014) Habits in dual process models. In: Sherman JW, Gawronski B, Trope Y (eds) Dual Process Theories of Social Mind. Guilford Press, London, pp 371–385 Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.


Moderate holism and the instability thesis

Philosophy

American Philosophical Quarterly Volume 36, Number 4, October 1999 MODERATE HOLISM AND THE INSTABILITY THESIS Henry Jackman .IVA entai or semantic holism can be roughly characterized as the doctrine that the meanings of one's sentence or the con? tents of one's beliefs are a function of (are determined by) their relations to all of one's other sentences and beliefs. Holistic theories of meaning and content are typi? cally criticized for (among other things) leaving the ideas of translation, disagree? ment, and change of mind problematic. However, such criticisms are more prop? erly directed at an "instability thesis" that, while often taken to be a consequence of holism, can be separated from it. A "mod? erate" holist need not be committed to the instability thesis, and can thus avoid many of the problems traditionally associated with holism. Holism has two alternatives: atomism (the doctrine that each of one's beliefs or sentences gets its content independently of its relation to one's other beliefs or sen? tences) and molecularism (the doctrine that each of one's beliefs or sentences gets its content in virtue of its relation to a corre? sponding subset of one's other beliefs or sentences). Atomistic and molecular theo? ries face a number of well-known problems.1 Nevertheless, they are often fa? vored over holistic theories because holism seems to demand that any differences in belief must result in differences in mean? ing or content. Among the most frequently cited reasons for not being a holist are the following two consequences of this pur? ported demand.2 First, holism seems to make literal trans? lation from one person's language into another's impossible. No two people have exactly the same beliefs, so by insisting that what one means by one's terms is a function of all of one's beliefs, holism sug? gests that no two people mean quite the same thing by any of their terms. If what one meant by, say, "elephant" were deter? mined by all of one's elephant-beliefs, then someone who believed that "elephants are afraid of mice" would mean something dif? ferent by "elephant" than someone who disbelieved it. As a result, there would be a radical "incommensurability" between people with different beliefs. Unless two people shared all their beliefs, they wouldn't share any of them. For instance, if Peter believes that elephants are afraid of mice, and Mary doesn't, then what may have initially appeared to be shared be? liefs?both claim "elephants are big animals"?would turn out to have differ? ent contents in virtue of the two believers 361 This content downloaded from 126.96.36.199 on Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:48:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 362 / AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY meaning different things by "elephant." Consequently, a translation from one of their languages into the other's couldn't be completely accurate, and their ascriptions of belief to each other would be, strictly speaking, false. Complete communication would thus be effectively impossible, and we would never fully grasp the content of anyone else's words or thoughts. Worse still, the same phenomenon occurs with even our most recently past selves. Since our total set of beliefs is constantly chang? ing, the holist seems committed to saying that the meanings of all of our terms and the contents of our beliefs are constantly changing as well. Translations within a single person's idiolect from one time to another would thus be inaccurate, and our belief ascriptions to our own past selves would also be, at best, only roughly true. Similarly, holism seems to make dis? agreement over matters of fact impossible. Peter and Mary might have seemed to dis? agree over a matter of fact about elephants, but the holist can only treat their "disagree? ment" as being over whether or not to accept the sentence "elephants are afraid of mice." Since the two would mean dif? ferent things by the sentence, their "disagreement" would just be a case of their talking past one another. There is no proposition that one believed to be true and the other believed to be false. Holism also seems to make it impossible to disagree with one's past self, and would thus rule out the possibility of one's ever changing one's mind about a proposition. If I initially believed that "elephants" were scared of mice, and subsequently came to believe that "elephants" were not scared of mice, then what I meant by "elephant" would have changed. There would thus be no proposition that I believed at one time and came to disbelieve at another. Such purported consequences of holism are extremely counterintuitive since we take translation, disagreement, and change of mind to be relatively unproblematic. Furthermore, most people take it to be sim? ply obvious that there can be differences of belief without differences of meaning. Consequently, the holist's purported denial of this possibility makes his view seem extremely unattractive. Short of giving up holism in favor of atomism or molecularism, there are two popular responses to the problems raised above.3 One is to adopt a "two-factor" theory in which a "narrow content" is de? termined holistically while a non-holistic "wide content" is comparatively invariant and shared.4 Disagreement, translation, and change of mind would thus all be under? stood in terms of the type of content that is not holistic. The other response is to sug? gest that we replace talk of content identity and difference with talk of content simi? larity.5 A single belief change may affect the content of all the terms involved, but the preand post-change contents will re? main, nevertheless, very similar. Both of these responses, however, con? cede that the holist is committed to what will here be called the "instability thesis," namely: Any change in one's attitude toward a sen? tence will change the meanings of the terms contained in it and the contents of the asso? ciated beliefs. Since the instability thesis requires that there be no changes of belief without changes of meaning, its truth would leave meaning and content tremendously un? stable, constantly changing even within a single person. The instability thesis lies at the heart of people's intuitive difficulties with holism, and a large part of the appeal of molecularism and atomism results from This content downloaded from 184.108.40.206 on Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:48:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MODERATE HOLISM AND THE INSTABILITY THESIS / 363 their not having to accept it. Nevertheless, holism's commitment to the instability the? sis is assumed by its defenders as often as by its critics.6 Both of the responses men? tioned above suggest ways for the holist to try to live with the instability thesis. The first admits the instability thesis to be true of one type of content, and then looks for a second non-holistic type of content for which it doesn't hold.7 The second suggest that we accommodate the instability the? sis by realizing that we can replace talk of sameness of meaning or content with talk of similarity of meaning or content, and recognize that the thesis doesn't leave meaning that unstable. However, such responses have not been entirely successful in making the instabil? ity associated with holism palatable. Indeed, it has been questioned whether such positions are even coherent. In par? ticular, some have challenged the intelligibility of the claim that there are independent wide and narrow contents,8 and others have argued that one cannot re? place content identity with content similarity because the former concept is presupposed by the latter.9 Whether or not such criticisms are ultimately telling, it remains the case that the instability thesis is hard to live with, and it isn't clear that any attempt to make it palatable will be successful. Fortunately, such attempts to make the instability thesis palatable may not be nec? essary because it isn't at all obvious that every holist must embrace instability. Ho? lism requires only that the content of any one of one's beliefs depend upon or be a function of one's other beliefs, and this claim need not commit one to the instabil? ity thesis. After all, one can claim that A is a function of B without implying that any change in B will produce a change in A. Consider, for instance, the claim that one's final letter grade in a class is a function of (depends upon) the results of one's exams, quizzes, and homework. The truth of this claim certainly doesn't entail that no two people could have the same final grade unless they had precisely the same score on all of their homework, exams, and quiz? zes. Neither does it entail that any change to one of one's quiz scores will produce a change in one's final grade. Each result makes some contribution to one's final grade, but not every change among the con? tributors will produce a corresponding change in the ultimate outcome. The func? tion from contributing scores to final grades is many-to-one, and thus allows a good deal of stability in the output in spite of the possibility of tremendous variation in the input.10 In much the same way, holism would entail instability only if it required that the function from beliefs to contents be one to-one, and there is nothing in the general characterization of holism that requires that the type of function involved be restricted in this way. If the function from belief to meaning turns out to be many-to-one, then content could be comparatively stable through changes in belief. One could thus claim that the meaning of "elephant" is a function of one's "elephant" beliefs with? out implying that every change in one's "elephant" beliefs will produce a corre? sponding change in the meaning of "elephant." Consequently, there is no rea? son why simply being a holist about meaning or content need commit one to the instability thesis. We can thus distinguish moderate ver? sions of holism, which treat the function from belief to meaning as many-to-one (and thus allow variations in belief that fail to produce variations in meaning), from radical versions of holism, which treat the function as one-to-one (and thus require This content downloaded from 22.214.171.124 on Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:48:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 364 / AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY any change in belief to produce a corre? sponding change in meaning). It is only radical holism that entails the instability thesis. A version of holism is thus best un? derstood as either radical or moderate in virtue of its understanding of the nature of the function from beliefs to meanings, not in virtue of whether it places any restric? tions on the inputs to this function.11 Of course, many holistic theories of meaning and content may be of the more radical sort, and thus may be committed to the instability thesis. For instance, those functionalists who identify a thought's con? tent with its functional/inferential/ conceptual role may (in the absence of cri? teria for dividing meaning constitutive inferences from others) be committed to a type of holism inseparable from the insta? bility thesis.12 In general, when holism is combined with a type of semantic internalism, the instability thesis tends to follow. It is much less likely to do so when holism is combined with a type of seman? tic externalism. Our internal states are idiosyncratic and changeable, and so the internalist is well placed to understand meaning as the type of thing that the insta? bility thesis could be true of. Instability can be accommodated easily within an internalist framework because when our beliefs change, our internal states typically change as well. The internalist is thus free to understand the "function" from belief to meaning as the one-to-one function of identity: the meaning of a term just is the set of beliefs, attitudes, and inferences as? sociated with it. Externalists, on the other hand, typically understand meaning at least partially in terms of belief-independent and "public" factors that are less likely to change with the agent's beliefs. Conse? quently, the function from beliefs to meanings is more likely to be many-to-one and map beliefs onto a shared set of com? parably stable external objects. One can see an example of this in the "interpretational" or "confirmation-based" types of holism inspired by Quine's remark that "the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science."13 That such holistic accounts need not be committed to the in? stability thesis becomes clear when we consider Davidson's suggestion that (very roughly) we identify the content of a sen? tence with its truth-conditions and the meanings of various terms with the (sets of) objects they refer to. While the sugges? tion that meaning be understood in terms of reference is frequently associated with atomistic theories, such an account can be holistic if reference (and hence meaning) is itself determined holistically. One can arrive at such a holistic account of reference by following N. L. Wilson's Principle of Charity, which suggests that one take the reference of a speaker's terms to be whatever set of objects maximizes the total (or some weighted total) number of sentences the speaker truly believes.14 That is to say, the function takes the total set of sentences held true as its input and gives beliefs and concepts/referents as its output. Such an account of reference will undoubt? edly be holistic: a term picks out the object it does because of the role that object plays in contributing, either directly or indirectly, to the truth of countless beliefs.15 Never? theless, even if countless beliefs played some role in determining the term's refer? ence, there is little reason to think that a change in one (or even a considerable num? ber) of these beliefs will change what is referred to. The truth of two different sets of "elephant" beliefs may, in spite of their differences, be maximized by precisely the same set of objects. Such a holist about reference could thus allow there to be This content downloaded from 220.127.116.11 on Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:48:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MODERATE HOLISM AND THE INSTABILITY THESIS / 365 changes in belief without changes in mean? ing, and hence avoid any commitment to the instability thesis. The Principle of Charity has, of course, been subject to fairly heavy criticism. In particular, it has frequently been criticized for misidentifying the truth conditions of our utterances. For instance, if I system? atically identify salamanders as "lizards," the Principle of Charity might seem to dic? tate that the truth conditions for my sentence "this is a lizard" must include salamanders. While I will not be able to give a thoroughgoing defense the Principle of Charity here,16 I'll only mention that the principle will be comparatively resistant to counterexamples (and turn out to be com? patible with most familiar forms of externalism) once one recognizes that: (1) The Principle is meant to "maximize" the true beliefs of the speaker in a way that is not strictly numerical (one thus needn't worry about the Quixotic project of counting beliefs). What is equally impor? tant to the goal of maximization is the comparative entrenchment of the beliefs that are held. Treating a central belief as false to preserve the truth of two periph? eral beliefs is far from charitable. (2) Charity is a "global" (or "holistic") prin? ciple, and its local application is often misleading. (3) Some of the beliefs that the principle deals with, indeed some of the most deeply held ones, are rarely made explicit.17 Once Charity is understood this way, we can see why one need not worry about cases like the salamanders mentioned above. My belief that a given salamander is a lizard is not as central for me as my beliefs that all lizards are reptiles, or, say, my assumption that I mean the same thing by "lizard" as most zoologists. Treating my utterance of "This is a lizard" as true if and only if I'm looking at a salamander-or-a lizard would make these more deeply held general beliefs false. Consequently, such a disjunctive interpretation of "lizard" would be uncharitable. Or, to take another case, while putting the condensation from various air conditioners into the extension of "rain" would make a few more of my "it's raining" utterances true, it would be uncharitable because it would falsify much more deeply held beliefs of mine such as "rain doesn't come from air conditioners."18 The fact that the type of moderate ho? lism outlined above makes use of the Principle of Charity is not, then, a serious problem for it, and none of the purported problems with holism discussed earlier face such a moderate holist. Two people can mean the same things by their words, in spite of differences in their beliefs, be? cause the function from their beliefs to what they mean is one that yields the same output from their often significantly dif? ferent inputs.19 While no two speakers may have precisely the same "elephant-beliefs," the objects that maximize the truth of their belief sets may be the same. As a result, both disagreement over matters of fact and translation from one idiolect to another become unproblematic. Much the same can be said for changes of mind. If I start be? lieving that elephants are afraid of mice, I change one minor input into my "elephant function," but not one that is important enough to change the function's output.20 The set of objects that maximizes the num? ber of true "elephant"-beliefs that I have (presumably elephants) will not change just because I start believing that elephants are afraid of mice. Only rarely will changes in a few beliefs change the object or objects that maximizes the truth of the belief set. Meaning can thus be invariant through be? lief change, and changes in attitude toward a single proposition will be possible. This content downloaded from 126.96.36.199 on Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:48:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 366 / AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY There remains, of course, the familiar problem of whether truth-conditional ac? counts of content, whether they are holistic or not, can account for, say, propositional attitude ascriptions. I obviously don't have space to deal with this important but dis? tinct question here, especially since the main purpose of this paper is to argue that holists need not be committed to instabil? ity, not to defend a particular holistic account of content.21 Nevertheless, one should note that even if "fine-grained" con ceptions must be added to the "coarse-grained" truth-conditional con? tents, the position outlined here (unlike typical "two factors" accounts) under? stands both factors holistically.22 Consequently, working with both concepts and conceptions would not amount to a retreat from holism. Furthermore, once holistic truth-conditions are in place, claims about the similarity of the finer grained conceptions are relatively unproblematic. Fodor argues that holists cannot help themselves to the idea of simi larky because similarity judgments presup? pose identity relations between at least some of the beliefs that make up the con? ceptions.23 However, while Fodor assumes that holists are not entitled to presuppose such identity relations, if one identifies beliefs by their holistically determined truth-conditional content, then one does have the resources to explain similarity relations between conceptions. Concep? tions are similar to the extent that they are made up of beliefs that have the same truth conditions. In conclusion, then, many of the criti? cisms of holism that have led people to embrace either atomism or molecularism are not criticisms of holism per se, but only of the instability thesis characteristic of certain radical brands of the doctrine. More moderate varieties of holism, which treat the function from belief to meaning as many-to-one (and thus don't require that ev? ery change in belief produce a change in meaning) are unaffected by such criticisms. University of Toledo NOTES I'd like to thank Robert Brandom, Joe Camp, Johnathan Cohen, Joshua Finkler, John McDowell, Madeline Muntersbjorn, Ram Neta, Gerald Vision, the editor of this journal, and members of the audience at the 1998 APA Central Division Meeting for comments on earlier versions of this paper. 1. Its commitment to the possibility of having, say, the concept red without the concept color, along with its difficulties in arriving at a satisfactory account of error, have made atomism seem implausible to many. Molecularists, on the other hand, have problems providing criteria to distin? guish those relations among beliefs that are meaning-constitutive from those that are not (problems familiar since Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction), and thus have difficulty pre? venting any non-atomistic position from sliding into a full-blown holistic one. Whether such criticisms are indeed telling is an open and important question, but since it is not my purpose here to criticize these non-holistic views, I will not pursue it here. 2. For a much more exhaustive list of purported problems with holistic theories (including their apparently disastrous consequences for psychological and scientific explanation), see Fodor and LePore 1992. This content downloaded from 188.8.131.52 on Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:48:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MODERATE HOLISM AND THE INSTABILITY THESIS / 367 3. A third response, simply biting the bullet and accepting all the consequences come what may, is less popular and will not be discussed here. 4. See, for instance, Block 1986 and Field 1977. 5. See, for instance, Block 1986, Churchland 1986, and Harman 1973, 1993. 6. Instances of this assumption are too numerous to exhaustively list. Consequently, I will simply note that the connection between holism and instability is not only assumed by critics of holism, such as Fodor and Lepore (1992) and Devitt (1996), but is taken for granted in sympathetic "expository" accounts of what holism is. For instance, the entries for holism in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy and The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Block 1998 and Guttenplan 1994) both take it as uncontroversial that holism leads to instability. It is also noteworthy that critical responses to Fodor and Lepore's attack on holism never question the link they draw between holism and instability (see the papers in Fodor and LePore 1993, and the symposium on their book in Philosophy and Ph?nom?nologieal Research 53, no. 3 [1993]). For a recent debate about holism that takes instability for granted, see Lormand 1996, Becker 1998, and Margolis and Laurence 1998. 7. Similar moves are made (but without any commitment to a narrow/wide distinction) in Bilgrami 1992 and Lormand 1996. 8. See McDowell 1986, Bilgrami 1992. 9. See Fodor and LePore 1992, especially pp. 17-22. 10. Of course beliefs and grades work in very different ways, and while grading is a good ex? ample of a many-to-one function from which some useful parallels can be drawn, one shouldn't push the analogy too far. 11. The latter approach would amount to equating moderate holism with a type of molecularism. For such a use of "moderate holism," see Guttenplan 1994. 12. See, for instance, Block 1986, Field 1977, Harman 1973, and Sellars 1974. A similar type of holistic theory that may entail a commitment to the instability thesis is Churchland's State-Space Semantics (see Churchland 1979, 1986). 13. Quine 1951, p. 42. Many writers in this tradition (most notably Davidson and Quine) have, admittedly, flirted with the instability thesis, but in spite of these flirtations, their actual case for holism can be separated from it. 14. Wilson 1959. 15. Of course, certain beliefs will be (with respect to each word) more heavily weighted than others (just as exams are more heavily weighted than quizzes), but (pace the molecularist) one should not think that these heavily weighted elements are the only things that contribute to mean? ing. Only some beliefs may have an immediate effect on meaning, but enough changes to the comparatively unimportant beliefs can occasionally change what is meant as well. 16. I attempt to do so in Jackman 1999. 17. Indeed, some of these "implicit" commitments may not even be best described as beliefs (see Jackman 1996, 1999). 18. Such cases are, once again, discussed in considerably more detail in Jackman 1999. 19. That is to say, the fact that the function is many-to-one in no way requires that the inputs be "similar" in the sense that Fodor takes to be problematic. The "conceptions" people associate with a word could be radically different and still be satisfied by the same objects. This content downloaded from 188.8.131.52 on Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:48:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 368 / AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 20. Still, one should not assume that the lack of immediate effect on meaning produced by such belief changes entails that those beliefs didn't contribute to what was meant. Such an assumption would be no more justified than assuming that the lack of immediate effect on one's final grade produced by some quiz score changes entailed that those quizzes did not contribute to the final grade. 21. The sort of account suggested above is, however, defended in Jackman 1996. 22. Furthermore, given that the beliefs that make up the conceptions also determine the referents, one need not worry about "the nasty question: What keeps the two notions of content stuck to? gether!" that Fodor and LePore claim cannot be answered by traditional "two-factor" accounts (Fodor and LePore 1992, p. 170). For a suggestion that traditional accounts such as Block's also have an answer to Fodor and LePore's challenge, see Bilgrami 1998. 23. Fodor and LePore 1992, pp. 17-22. BIBLIOGRAPHY Becker, K. 1998. "On the Perfectly General Nature of Instability in Meaning Holism." The Jour? nal of Philosophy 95, no. 12: 635-640. Bilgrami, A. 1992. Belief and Meaning. Cambridge: Blackwell. Bilgrami, A. 1998. "Why Holism is Harmless and Necessary." In Philosophical Perspectives 12: Language, Mind and Ontology, ed. Tomberlin. Boston: Blackwell. Block, N. 1986. "Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology." In Midwest Studies in Philoso? phy X: Studies in the Philosophy of Mind, ed. French, Uehling, and Wettstein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Block, N. 1998. "Holism, Mental and Semantic." In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Craig. London: Routledge. Churchland, P. 1979. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni? versity Press. Churchland, P. 1986. "Some Reductive Strategies in Cognitive Neurobiology." In Churchland, P. A N euro computational Perspective. Cambridge: MIT. Devitt, M. 1996. Coming to Our Senses. New York: Cambridge University Press. Field, H. 1977. "Logic, Meaning and Conceptual Role." The Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 7: 379-409. Fodor, G. and LePore, E. 1992. Holism: A Shoppers Guide. Cambridge: Blackwell. Fodor, G. and Lepore, E., eds., 1993. Holism: A Consumers Update. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Guttenplan, S. 1994. "Holism." In A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Guttenplan. Cam? bridge: Blackwell. Harman, G. 1973. Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harman, G. 1993. "Meaning Holism Defended." In Fodor and Lepore 1993. Jackman, H. 1996. Semantic Norms and Temporal Externalism. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Pitts? burgh. Jackman, H. 1999. "Charity, Self-Interpretation, and Belief." Unpublished Manuscript, University of Toledo. Lormand, E. 1996. "How to be a Meaning Holist." The Journal of Philosophy 93, no. 2: 51-73. Margolis, E. and Laurence, S. 1998. "Multiple Meanings and the Stability of Content." The Jour? nal of Philosophy 95, no. 5: 255-63. This content downloaded from 220.127.116.11 on Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:48:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions MODERATE HOLISM AND THE INSTABILITY THESIS / 369 McDowell, J. 1986. "Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space." In Subject, Thought, and Context, ed. Pettit and McDowell. New York: Oxford University Press. Quine, W.V.O. 1953. "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." In Quine, W.V.O., From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Seilars, W. 1974. "Meaning as Functional Classification." Synthese 27: 417-37. Wilson, N. L. 1959. "Substance Without Substrata." Review of Metaphysics 12: 521-39. This content downloaded from 22.214.171.124 on Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:48:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions