Jennifer Hornsby on Human Agency
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This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds. And me, Nigel Warburton. Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybites.com. What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm went up from the fact that I raised my arm? A question asked by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was getting at a notoriously complex issue. What is it for a person, an agent, to will or intend an action?

If I intend to raise my arm and then do so, is this will, this intention, something that happens in the brain, something that could be physically identified, say, and does this willing, this intending, then cause my arm to rise? Jennifer Hornsby of London's Birkbeck College and Oslo Centre of the Study of Mind in Nature thinks this picture of how human action works is misconceived. Jennifer Hornsby, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you, hello.

Now, the topic we want to look at today is human agency. For non-philosophers, that's not an obvious topic. Could you just explain what we mean by human agency? Yeah, human beings are thought of as agents insofar as they can do things. And on a natural understanding of things we do in the world, to do something is to bring about a change, to cause something to happen or perhaps to prevent it from happening.

So it's human beings in their role as causes that human agency is getting at. So when we do things, we act as agents. And there is a standard picture that is dominant in philosophy of how we come to do things. Could you just elaborate on that a little?

Yes, according to the dominant picture, when someone does something and there's an event and that's her doing it, and in order to understand what's special about the events, which are agents doing things...

We have to think of them as having certain distinctive sorts of causal antecedent. And according to the standard story, these antecedents are beliefs and desires. So someone does something because she thinks something or other is the case and she wants something or other to be the case.

and we have a causal explanation of her doing what she does when we say what she thinks and wants. That's the usual picture. Could you just give an example to help us follow through exactly what's going on there? OK, imagine that someone's crossing the road and we ask why she's crossing the road. Then the answer might be she wants to get on the 59 bus and believes that she'll be able to get on the 59 bus if she gets to the other side of the road, something like that.

So what you've got is beliefs and desires that come before the action. They're the antecedent causes of that action. They bring it about that she behaves in that way. That's right. And according to the standard picture, these beliefs and desires can be thought of as, if you like, on a causal chain.

They're causes in a sense that we can understand otherwise than by reference to human agency because we have a picture of causal chains at work in the world generally. And they lead in the first instance, these beliefs and desires, to motions of the body which in their turn lead to being on the side of the road one wants to be or whatever it might be. And ultimately on that picture you could give a physiological account of the beliefs and desires in terms of somebody's bodily state, their brain state.

That's right. Indeed, the picture goes hand in hand with a view in philosophy of mind according to which mental states are to be thought of as states of the brain. So this is a picture of agency which just feeds straight into the physicalistic philosophy of mind by which each of our mental states and all of the mental events in which we participate are to be thought of as identifiable with something recognisably physical.

So if we had a brain scanner that was operating on this woman about to catch a bus, you'd presumably see a little bit of movement in the belief and desire areas that then lead to twitches and she starts moving her muscles and moves across. We think of these causes in the brain as the things that lead to her action. Yes. I mean, I guess anyone who buys into this story would want to be a bit more sophisticated about the neurophysiology than that suggests. But I think that is one way of catching the underlying picture.

And you're not happy with this picture, are you? Do you think there's something wrong with it or several things wrong with it? Yes, that's right. I mean, it's not that I object to the idea that we can often find something that someone thinks and wants and that will explain why she does something. One thing I think that's wrong is the assumption that when we give causal explanations, as indeed we can, what we're doing is locating particulars which might as well be identified with something physical.

I think there's a distinctive sort of explanation which goes with human agency and that it's just wrong to assimilate it to the sort that we give when we have one particular event in the world causing another particular event in the world. So in a way the mistake is to think of human beings as some kind of mechanical device that we can take apart and see how it works?

Yes. I mean, I think the mistake, in a sense, starts even earlier than that. The mistake is to think that we should understand causality in the world always in the terms in which, say, physicists or other sorts of scientists understand it, according to which we can think of causal chains of states and events whenever we've got a case of causality. So I think the mistake begins when it's forgotten that causality

people are the causes in cases of human agency, that people bring things about in the world. So another way perhaps is to say that we're putting human beings back at the centre of the causal chain or the start of the causal chain rather than looking within human beings for chains going back through the physiological antecedents of the event.

Yes, that's right. I mean, we're getting human beings into causal chains. I wouldn't quite want to say that at the start of them, because then it makes it look as though when one's got a case of human agency, a human being sort of entering into the world of causation. Of course, I think there are plenty of causal influences on human beings so that we've got causation to human beings as well as from human beings. And if we go back to the woman crossing the road to catch the bus...

How would you then explain what's going on? If you're not going to say, well, she had these beliefs and desires, that's what caused her to act in that way. What would you say? I think we shouldn't forget that ordinarily when we answer why questions about why someone did something, we've got a case of human agency and we want an explanation. We actually don't speak to states of mind at all. We can say, why is she crossing the road? The 59 bus is on the other side and that'll explain.

make it clear why she's crossing the road for anyone who knows that she might be someone who might want to catch the 59 bus. So I think if we actually start from the naive kinds of action explanations that we give every day, we'll get a better idea of what it is to do something for a reason than if we try to think of reasons always in terms of possession of mental states and these in their turn as distinct causal influences on the motions of bodies.

One of the things about the standard approach seems to be that it makes the causes of our action internal somehow. They're things that happen that aren't necessarily visible. They happen in somebody's head in a way that isn't directly open to somebody observing them.

Yes, that's right. So we think that there are bodily motions on the one hand and they're overt and in the external world and anyone can see them. And on the other hand, there are these mental states which are the hidden causes. Whereas on an alternative picture, it's possible to think that when someone's acting with an intention, what you can see, if you're knowledgeable enough about the person at least, is the fact of their acting intentionally, right?

That's there in the, as we say, external world. That's really interesting because what it means is you can see this woman crossing the road and her intention isn't something which is contained in her head somewhere. You see her acting intentionally in a particular way. You don't have anything further to look for. Yes, that's right. And if she's crossing the road as we had it because she wants to get the 59 bus...

then one of the things she's doing is crossing the road in order to get the 59 bus. I mean, that might not be obvious to someone who doesn't know which buses she wants to catch, but that's one of the facts of the matter, that she's doing something in order to do something else. Do you think anything important follows from which story you adopt? Well, as I've made clear, I don't think the standard story's true, so I think, of course, that anything based on it's wrong. I find it quite interesting, actually, that a lot of philosophers,

seem to say things which just are very hard to reconcile with the standard story. And yet, when they're being self-conscious about what their beliefs are about human agency, they start telling the standard story. So it looks as though worrying about exactly what human agency is isn't going to affect what one naturally says, for instance, when one's doing ethics or whatever.

I suppose I think it's important whether the standard story is right because it's important that we should have a right conception of ourselves and that's one of the things that philosophy is supposed to help us to do.

And you see, in this particular case, I think we can't have a right conception of ourselves if we buy into a doctrine which is called sometimes fundamentalism, according to which the physicists know how the world works because they deal with the fundamental things. There's one complete story and it surely has to be told in fundamental terms. And I think quite generally it's important that that's the sort of fundamentalism, among other sorts of fundamentalism, no doubt, that we should reject fundamentally.

You've devoted a lot of energy and time to these questions. What motivates you here? What's really making you get so involved with what is quite an abstract and difficult topic? We've maybe made it seem abstract and difficult by taking it away from the rest of philosophy. But of course, the philosophy of action has to be thought of as part of the philosophy of mind. And the philosophy of mind, in my view, incorporates epistemology.

So actually I think that when we think of ourselves as agents, we're thinking of ourselves as minded beings, knowing beings. So everything which is distinctive about human beings is something that one's going to be touching on in considering human agency. So if we care about what distinctive sort of entities human beings are, then agency is going to be a way into all the important questions. Jennifer Hornsby, thank you very much. Thank you.

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