Abstract
We provide an account of chimpanzee-specific agency within the context of philosophy of action. We do so by showing that chimpanzees are capable of what we call reason-directed action, even though they may be incapable of more full-blown action, which we call reason-considered action. Although chimpanzee agency does not possess all the features of typical adult human agency, chimpanzee agency is evolutionarily responsive to their environment and overlaps considerably with our own. As such, it is an evolved set of capacities for goal-directed behavior, which solves problems that chimpanzees (and humans) naturally encounter. Thus, it ought not be understood as a deficient instance of human agency.
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Notes
There are philosophers who defend the claim that some animals, despite not having language, possess propositional attitudes. See Saidel (2009) for an example.
As will become apparent, our account clearly extends to other non-human species. However, any attempt to distinguish human-specific agency from non-human animal agency might profit by examining our evolutionary closest living relations, chimpanzees and other great apes.
As discussed above, other philosophers of action take their view to accommodate non-human animal agency, but they do not provide a specific defense of it. These views, by contrast, specifically address this question.
Nothing in what we are about to argue depends on the assumption that they do not have propositional attitudes; rather, if it turns out that they do, then all the better for the case that chimpanzees are agents. Our account is not inconsistent with this possibility.
Note that Dennett’s account allows for the possibility that this interpretative strategy can accommodate non-human systems.
Traditionally, the intentional stance in interpreted as justifying the following judgment: We can treat the creature as if the creature were an agent, but we are not warranted in inferring that the creature is in fact an agent.
Of course, it is not the case that all entities deserve this initial attribution (Dennett 1987, pp. 16–17). As Dennett notes, an alarm clock that alerts its owner to wake up at six o’clock in the morning is best explained by the design stance (p. 17), whereby we explain the “actions” of the clock by citing its designed internal workings. The design stance is a better (read: “more predictively accurate”) stance than the intentional stance in this case.
The issue is not that the design stance cannot accommodate evolutionary explanations that cite evolutionary adaptation as the relevant “design” in question. In fact, as Dennett notes, it is well suited for these types of explanations. The pressure that pushes us toward the intentional stance in cases such as that of the chimpanzee is the issue of the complex changes in behavior that the chimpanzee produces.
We intend these criticisms to apply directly to the case of using the intentional stance to show that chimpanzees are agents. It goes without saying that there is a large body of literature on Dennett’s view, and, in this regard, our criticisms should be taken in the limited context of the question under present consideration.
Cases where, say, the intentional stance does no better but no worse than mechanistic explanations present a puzzle for this type of view. Presumably, empirical observation would be the only way to resolve the impasse, further supporting one of our central objections (see below).
Even if one were satisfied with this relatively unstable foundation on which to base one’s attribution of agency to chimpanzees, there is a second, more significant problem with the commitments on which the intentional stance depends. Contrary to its stated aims, the intentional stance ends up making commitments about the existence of the states, whether brain states or mental states, that it proposes to attribute to possible agents in the “as if” mode. The reason is clear: the intentional stance relies on the criterion of predictive success (or some other view about how science works). Thus, if you think that the stance has been predictively successful, then you are left thinking that there is some causally efficacious set of states doing the relevant causal work. See Fodor and Lepore (1993, p. 76) for a related criticism. See Dennett (1987, pp. 34–35) for a response to this criticism.
See Fodor and Lepore (1993, p. 76) for a criticism of the claim that an epistemic position—that of the intentional stance (or any stance, for that matter)—can either “make facts” or make them disappear. See also Andrews (2000, p. 19-ff) for a discussion of how this problem applies to using the intentional stance in theory of mind debates about non-human primates.
See Sober (2005, pp. 93–96) for a defense of the claim that Morgan’s canon can, for some evolutionarily derived similar traits between humans and non-human animals, license anthropomorphic conclusions as the most parsimonious. Povinelli and colleagues argue that such an approach is unwarranted (Povinelli and Giambrone 1999; Povinelli 2003).
Under this interpretation, the intentional stance would be indistinguishable from standard scientific practice, in which case the former is unnecessary.
We would go farther and claim that Dennett is wrong that the judgment to treat them as if they were intentional agents is exclusively a conceptual matter. We side with Millikan (2000, p. 65) that it is not.
Naturally, these accounts do so on a variety of different grounds and, in some cases, understand what “acting for a reason” constitutes in diverging ways.
Velleman’s brand of constitutivism does not take acting for reasons to be the hallmark of agency or intentional action. Nonetheless, we do not think that Velleman would deny that acting for reasons is an important part of what pursuing this aim involves.
Davidson (2001a, p. 12) notes that reasons (qua beliefs plus a pro-attitude toward a particular state of affairs), are typically understood as states but do not manifest themselves as states. Their “onslaught,” as he puts it, is an event.
Even Davidson (2001c, pp. 78–80), in his discussion of the infamous climber case, notes that reasons must cause actions in the “right kind of way” in order to count as cases of intentional actions. One might suppose that he had in mind something like the condition that one takes one’s reasons as one’s own.
We set aside the claim, as defended by Alvarez (2009a), that actions can be intentional and yet not done for reasons.
We are grateful to an anonymous referee for pushing us to consider this objection more carefully.
On one reading of Davidson’s account, it is possible to explain these cases (see Clarke 2010 for an example of such a defense, at least in the case of skilled activity). After all, you had the relevant belief-desire pair—namely, you wanted to get home and you believed that if you drove a certain route, you would arrive there—such that automatic driving does count as an intentional action. But, as is well known, reading Davidson’s view in this way allows for the problem of causal deviance and requires as a possible, but problematic, solution that we add the condition that agents relate to their reasons in the right kind of way (Chisholm 1966, pp. 29–30; Frankfurt 1978; Mele and Moser 1994; Schlosser 2007, p. 189; Velleman 2000).
Might the same action could be, in one case, reason-considered and, in another, reason-directed? Yes, in principle, because it is the agent’s relationship to the action that matters here. There may, however, be limiting (even non-contentful) conditions on the kinds of actions that can be reason-directed.
For some philosophers of action, ‘reason-directed’ action may sound close to what is often called ‘intention in action,’ or the intention that guides the action as we are engaging in it. On our view, reason-directed actions are those actions that bear the right relationship to considerations that function as reasons for the agent. Whether they ought be understood as prospective intentions or intentions-in-action is a further aspect of the capacity for intentional action that is beyond the scope of this paper.
Note that Railton (2009, p. 96) takes skilled driving, rather than automatic driving, to be a relevant example. It seems reasonable to think that, barring luck, one must be a skilled driver to engage in automatic driving in the first place.
We do so in our (ms) “Two Ways of Acting for Reasons”.
This claim is exemplified by the distinction between basic and non-basic (or complex) actions.
We take it that Railton (2009, p. 102) has something like this claim in mind when he argues that all actions have an “unpremeditated core.”
Saidel (2009, pp. 35–36) also argues that goal-directed behavior is, for some non-human animals, an indication of their capacity to engage in genuine actions. However, Saidel suggests that this status provides evidence for concluding that non-human animals have genuine beliefs and desires, which is exactly the controversial content we seek to avoid.
See Sterelny (2003, p. 259) for a challenge to Hurley’s so-called “interpretativist” strategy.
Compare with Bermúdez (2003, esp. Sect. 3.5).
There is even the empirically-motivated possibility that they cannot transfer reasons in this manner in any contexts (see Penn et al. 2008).
For an extended discussion of the relationship between uniquely human and more ancestral forms of cognition, see Penn et al. 2008. Hurley (2003b) also discusses this issue in response to Godfrey-Smith’s (2003) claim that she tries to derive an account of the shared architecture of human and non-human animal agents from an account of their roughly shared folk psychology.
Steward (2009, p. 224) defends this claim, although on the grounds that what we are calling the lower-order system is a form of purposive agency.
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Acknowledgments
The writing of this paper was funded in part by a Grant from the University of Texas at El Paso’s University Research Institute. We thank two anonymous referees for this journal. Caroline Arruda also thanks Gregory Nirshberg, who served as her research assistant while she prepared to write this paper.
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Arruda, C.T., Povinelli, D.J. Chimps as secret agents. Synthese 193, 2129–2158 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0835-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0835-9