But if my intention does not influence the action then my being engaged in the action is not controlling the action. I wouldn't even say that the action is intended (intentional). — litewave

When we characterize an intentional action we often use a verb phrase that doesn't merely describe the bodily motions of the person who is acting but also the ends that she is pursuing. For instance, we might say that she is (intentionally) making an omelet. And this explains why she is heating the frying pan, breaking eggs, chopping up mushrooms, etc. All that purposeful activity is geared towards realizing the end characterized as "having made an omelet". As long as the person is performing this overarching action intentionally, all the component actions that are means towards that end are being performed by her thanks to her understanding them to be such necessary means. So, I am suggesting that what makes the action intentional under such a description (i.e. "making an omelet") is the fact that the agent is pursuing that goal while being able to deliberate practically towards realizing that goal; that is, judging what the necessary means are and executing them for that reason.

So, yes, you may say that the intention influences the action, but that is merely to say that the agent's self-determination of her own goals and her ability to reason instrumentally towards achieving them, explains how her basic actions are being structured by her while her overarching action progresses.

I would say that my intention to express something verbally causes the related words to come to my tongue. For example if I intend to communicate to someone that I have the feeling of hunger, this intention draws the word "hunger" from my lexical memory and pushes it to the speech center in my brain which activates my tongue, lips, breathing and so on in such a way that the sound of the word "hunger" is produced. I guess this is roughly the causal neurological process.

It seems doubtful to me that there is a wordless thought process that operates upstream from any of our exercises of abilities to use words when we are reasoning or forming intentions. And, in fact, I think there might be evidence to the contrary from cognitive neuroscience. but if you don't accept this then my Rylean example will not be helpful.

I may not absolutely need, however, to appeal to this Rylean model in order to argue that freely chosen courses of action need not be controlled by prior intentions that themselves are chosen intentionally, as you suggested in your original post (as an alleged requirement of libertarian free will). Even if we construe the forming of an intention as a purely mental act, that occurs prior to acting, and that controls our actions, there still need not be a separate act of choosing to intend in this way in order that the intention be free and that we be responsible for it.

As Fafner suggested, for an intentional action to be free in the relevant sense that secures the agent's responsibility, the source of the intention must be the agent herself rather than antecedent causes that lay beyond the scopes of her control and agency. But if, as I suggested, what the formation of an intention essentially reflects is the agent's sensitivity to the practical considerations that, by her own lights, make it reasonable and intelligible that she would pursue this intended course of action, then she is a free as anyone may wish to be when she so intends.

As I also suggested, such an explanation of action looks very much like a compatibilist account. But it is crucially distinguished from standard compatibilist accounts in an important respect. If what grounds the agent's decision is her being sensitive to the features of her practical situation that make it reasonable, by her own lights, that she ought to so act, then her actions aren't determined by prior causes that have receded in the historical past and that therefore lay beyond her control.

It seems that the part "is manifested in" can be easily substituted with "causes".

It can't be so substituted since what is being manifested in intentional action is the agent's sensitivity to the reasons why she acts and the rational outcome of this sensitivity isn't caused by past events. Such a capacity is only, at most, being enabled by the past history of the agent. We are not free the become rational agents because we are relying on our having suitable biological and social endowments. But when those necessary causal requirements are met, then we acquire the sort of rational and moral autonomy that make us free and responsible.

Why? To believe that pi is irrational means to believe that its decimal expansion is infinite and is not periodic. So that which caused me to have this belief also causes (indirectly, through the belief) my answer when I am asked what I believe about pi

That would be correct if we were always being passively caused to acquire our beliefs through the impact of brute external events. But this would be to deny that we have rational abilities to critically assess our beliefs and their sources in such a manner as to secure genuine knowledge. This is why my example was focused on knowledge rather than belief, since our rational ability to know is analogous to our ability to reasons practically and determine our ends.

When we have a rational ability to know, then the reasons why we come to endorse specific beliefs and repudiate others can liberate us from the past vagaries that caused us to acquire them in the first place. We can then submit them the rational criticism (which may be a quite trivial business, such as checking for commons sources of illusion, or ceasing to trust habitual liars, etc.) and what thereby comes to be the cause of our states of genuine knowledge becomes our own self-determined power to asses the justifications of our beliefs.

What about computers and neutron stars?

The problem is that I don't understand how you can control the intentional action if your intention doesn't influence it. The intention on your view seems to be just an epiphenomenon that is formed simultaneously with your action. — litewave

You don't need to control the intentional action since your being engaged in an intentional action already is your controlling what happens with your own body and surroundings. It's not as if you were a puppet and what you need in order to control your action is to be able to pull your own strings. On my view -- which I also take to be broadly consistent with the view of several contemporary philosophers of action -- our intentions aren't epiphenomena that accompany our bodily movements. Rather, they are being manifested in the rational structure of those voluntary movements. (Compare how the canvas of a tissue accounts for its tensile strength, but doesn't cause it in the manner of an antecedent condition.)

It might be useful to compare this with Gilbert Ryle's polemic against the "dogma of the Ghost in the Machine". On Ryle's view, when you are talking intelligently you may on occasion, but usually don't, think how you are going to string your words together in order to convey an intelligent thought. Rather, in the usual case, your ability to intelligently come up with the correct words, on the fly, as it were, is partly constitutive of your ability to think out loud. Likewise, in the case of intentional action, your ability to intelligently manipulate the material world around you reveals your activity as intentional and responsive to instrumental reasons (among other sorts of reasons that you are freely endorsing at the time when you are acting).

This seems to be ordinary causation where a temporally prior intention (to go to Cuba) causes another intention (to book plane tickets).

I would rather say that your prior intention to go to Cuba, as well as your ability to reason instrumentally, is manifested in your now booking the plane tickets (and many other things that you do, or refrain from doing when that would interfere with your plans). This is a manifestation of your practical knowledge (i.e. your knowledge of what it is that you are doing and why you are doing it) being retained over long stretches of time: until such a time, usually, when your intention has been realized.

Compare this with the case of theoretical knowledge. If you acquire on Monday the knowledge that pi is an irrational number and are being asked on Wednesday whether the decimal expansion of pi is periodic, you will say that it isn't. This is a manifestation of you persistent knowledge that pi is irrational (and your ability to rationally infer things from what you know). It would be strange to say that your answer that pi isn't periodic has been caused by whatever caused you, in the past, to believe that pi is irrational. (Though that could be a sensible contrastive explanation to offer to someone who knew that you used to be ignorant of the fact that pi is irrational). Your answer to the question rather is, in the usual case, best explained as the continued manifestation of a piece theoretical knowledge that you once acquired and now retain together with your ability to make inferences on its basis.

If the intention causes the action instantaneously via some different/timeless way of causation, we can still ask whether the act of forming the intention is caused (via this different/timeless way of causation) by an intention to form that intention, and if it is then the act of forming the intention is intentional too, but this leads us to an infinite regress of intentions in a timeless instant. — litewave

Yes, indeed, which is why I am agreeing with you that intending to do something (or forming such an intention) does not require a prior act of intending to form that intention. Also, an intentional action, on the account I have been recommending, isn't a further act causally downstream from the act of intending. Rather, to say that an action is intentional just is a way to characterize the actions of rational animals as the sorts of rationally structured behaviors that they are.

Are you saying here that our actions cause our intentions to do the actions? In that case it is difficult to understand how we control our actions. It is more like our actions control us.

Yes and no. Intentions are internally structured by means-ends relationships. They are teleologically organized, we may say. That's because the parts of our action (their "proper temporal stages", we may call them, although this way of characterizing the "parts" of our action is slightly misleading) are actions done by us as means to realizing what our overarching action is done for the sake of. They are means to our ends.

So, to refer back to my earlier trip-to-Cuba example, if I intend to go to Cuba next month, then this already existing intention can be the cause, in a sense, of my forming today a new intention to book plane tickets. So, whenever A is a means of doing B, then what causes my intending to do A is my intending to do B. The sort of causation that is at play here might be called rational causation. It is because it is rational to do A when one intends to do B that one forms an intention to do A.

Now, this sort of causal explanation of intentional action could be thought to lead to troublesome regresses in two different ways. The first worry is that when the time comes to act on an intention for the future, one must then intend to act on one's prior intention when the time comes. (This is what John Searle views as the "gap" problem.) The second worry is that, if a prior intention to do A explains why one intends to do B, when A is a means to do B, then there ought to be another action C that one intends to do in order to explain why one intends to do B, and so on ad infinitum.

In order to block the first regress, my suggestion (similar to Fafner's) is that intending to do A and doing A intentionally just are two ways to characterize the very same thing. Intentions aren't purely mental acts that stand behind people's intentional actions. They rather are the manner in which such actions are rationally structured. (Compare Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind on "mental processes" and "intelligent acts").

I've also sketched a way to block the second regress through appealing to the considerations in the light of which an agent acts. When a chain of 'why?' questions terminates with the mention of the broadest intentional action (e.g. "Why are you breaking eggs?", ... , "Why are you making an omelet?", ... , "Why are you having guests for dinner?") then the final answer need not refer to an intention to form the intention of having guests for dinner. Rather, it terminates with the mention that one enjoys the company of those particular guests or whatever. (There'd be more to say about the way reasons can rationalize and, at the same time, explain, other actions in a way that is very similar to the way overarching actions rationalize their component actions.)

I suppose this means that the intention does not influence the intentional act and thus denies point 1 of my argument? If an intention does not precede the act then there is no time for the intention to influence the act. — litewave

It does indeed negate the first point, but not because there is no time for a prior intention to influence the action. It is rather because, on my view (which appears to be similar to Fafner's), prior "intentions to act" -- or intentions for the future, we may call them -- stand to intentional actions in the same sort of causal relation that intentions in action stand to with respect to the intentional actions that manifest them. And this form of causation is quite different from event-event-causation where something that occurs at a time causes something else to occur at a later time (or maybe at the very same time) by virtue of some natural law.

So, on the alternative view, acts of the will aren't mental acts that occur prior to intentional actions (or instantaneously at the same time when the action begins). Rather the intentions themselves are manifestations of our acts of will. As Eric Marcus has put the point, it makes sense to say that, in the case of intentional actions, the whole is the cause of the parts. For instance, the fact that you are making an omelet (which is a manifestation of the orientation of your will at that time) can explain why you are breaking eggs. What is it, then, that explains the fact that you are intentionally making an omelet? The explanation for this can not be: because you formed the intention to do so. That would be a dummy explanation. ("Why are you making an omelet?" -- "I was caused to do so by my prior intention to make an omelet.")

Rather, when asked why you are doing something, the chain of explanation terminates with your mention of the considerations that, by your own lights, makes it reasonable for you to do it. The mention of those reasons make it intelligible why you are doing it in a manner that is quite different from mentioning prior causes of an event.

That is not to say that mention of prior causes can't be explanatory as well. In order to act for some reason, it must be the case that you were suitably inclined to be moved by some rational considerations, or that you were suitably informed of the relevant features of your practical situation. But such contrastive explanations lay out some of the necessary or enabling conditions for your having exercised your ability to rationally decide what to do. They don't necessarily constitute restrictions on your freedom. This is a point compatibilists usually get right. Where compatibilists often go wrong may be in thinking that such prior conditions necessitate the actual action.

When we turn from the search for necessary conditions for human actions to sufficient conditions for them, then we must inquire into the reasons why the agent is doing what she is doing and such an inquiry into the intelligibility of her behavior is entirely different from the first inquiry. It isn't looking for antecedent "causes" in the past.

I'm wondering now if every theory can be forced into an ad hoc refinement — Srap Tasmaner

Are you thinking of substance-sortals, event-types or concepts of natural kinds as reflecting theories? Or are you thinking about something else? Surely, all scientific theories reflect some specific focus of our interests since when some empirical domain is being investigated, some features of its objects are being considered while others are abstracted away or ignored as irrelevant. As our focus changes, sometimes in response to unforeseen discoveries, then this may yield progressive refinements of our concepts. However, such refinements need not be ad hoc except in the sense that our new focus is always responsive to our present theoretical or practical interests.

Can you explain the "just not right now" part? — Fafner

Yes. The idea is that the formation of an intention amounts to the (practical) rational determination of an orientation of the will. It is akin to the endorsement of a plan that structures behavior, and behavioral dispositions, from then on (and until such a time when what one intended to do has been done, or one has changed one's mind about doing it). On Anscombe's account, acting and reasoning practically aren't separate activities since actions are internally structured by means-end relations. So, as you are acting intentionally, you are determining what you are doing (the component parts of your action), in accordance with the overarching intention, as means to realizing it or of progressing towards the achievement if its goal.

In view of this, an action can be viewed as furnishing the reasons why an agent is performing the component parts of her action. Hence, if I intend to go to Cuba for my next vacations, the fact that I intend to go to Cuba may motivate me to shop for plane tickets, or to decline an invitation elsewhere. When asked why I am shopping for plane tickets, or declining the invitation, I may reply that's because I am going to Cuba next month. I need not say that it's because I will be going to Cuba next month. Effectively, the fact that I'm going to Cuba next month already is structuring my action right now through means-end relationships. So, it's similar to saying that I'm breaking eggs because I'm making an omelet. However, when I'm breaking eggs, I've thereby already started making the omelet. But when I'm buying tickets because I'm going to Cuba next month, I'm not going there right now. I'm intending to go next month. But since I'm right now structuring my behavior in view of that end, there also is a clear sense in which my action (i.e. going to Cuba) is present. And this is what motivates the use of the present tense when one is invoking intentions for the future in justifying what one is doing right now.

I hope this isn't too confusing. The main lesson is that although I am not going to Cuba right now (I think McDowell's phrase was "I am doing it... only not yet", this action has as its constitutive parts present component actions and/or present dispositions that already are structured by it.

On edit: I just found the following quote: "Intention for the here and now is, if you like, a kind of thought. But it is practical in the sense that assenting to such a thought just is beginning to act in a certain way, for instance starting to cross a street; and continuing to assent – not revoking one’s assent – is continuing to act, for instance continuing to cross the street. An intention for the future is, by all means, a thought of the same kind, apart from the time difference. But the way to accommodate that is not to distance intention for the here and now from acting, on the ground that intending purely for the future is not acting, but to conceive an intention for the future as a potential action biding its time." -- John McDowell, Some Remarks on Intention in Action (my emphasis)

That's a nice way to put it! An intention for the future is a potential action that is biding its time.

Right, I think that I picked this idea from McDowell, and it is interesting to know that it goes way back. — Fafner

Has a philosopher ever had a good idea such that Aristotle hadn't already beaten them to the punch ;-) Maybe some Pre-Socratic...

In other words, when you act freely, it is not because there's a distinct event which is your intention to act freely, that somehow causes your action; but rather the intention is an aspect or a property of the action itself, and thus not a separable entity. — Fafner

This is my view also. Following Elizabeth Anscombe, it has become much more common to view intentions that occur prior to the initiation of actions on the same model as intentional actions (or intentions in actions as John Searle calls them). This is consistent with Aristotle's claim that actions are the conclusions of acts of practical deliberation. Or, as John McDowell puts it, when one intends to do something, one is thereby doing it, just not right now.

This view of intentions being constitutive parts of the actions that they govern indeed avoids some of the regress problems that afflict voluntarist conceptions of action that picture acts of the will as mental events separate from the actions that they allegedly cause.

If you're convinced of this why waste your time convincing others it is not real?
What use would it bring? — JupiterJess

Because it's a fair topic for philosophical discussion? Also, the goal might not be convincing others but rather to test out some ideas in view of reaching a better understanding.

But my suspicion is that this is just not true, that it's always the amount of flour we're interested in and the bag is just the obvious way of referring to how much. If bags of flour did not have weights printed on them, a grocer who emptied some of the flour from each bag would still be a cheat. "It's still a bag of flour" wouldn't be much of a defense. — Srap Tasmaner

Likewise if you would buy a statue of Hermes and it's damaged during transport. And then the seller tells you: "But it's still a statue! Now it has become a statue of Donald J. Trump." But what you bought was a statue of Hermes and that statue doesn't exist anymore.

So, statue is a sortal concept that may be modified by the qualifier of Hermes in order to further specify its conditions of persistence and identity. If it is damaged to the point that it doesn't recognizably depict Hermes anymore, then it may still be a statue, but it is a (numerically) different statue.

And likewise with a 10kg bag of flour. If one kilogram is taken out, then it's still a bag of flour. But it's no longer a 10kg bag of flour for purpose of sale. However, I must concede that it's still the same bag of flour, for purpose of consumption (as it's being progressively used up in your own home, say). So, you most definitely have a point.

Actually I'm not quite sure what is supposed to be the actual paradox in the ship of Theseus story. — Fafner

The usual way it's told in a paradoxical manner is when the old damaged planks that are being replaced over time are being collected somewhere and eventually reassembled in the same form as the old ship. But there are now two ships in existence. One of them is continuous with the original and the other one matches the original both in form and material constitution (though it's not historically continuous, unless you view it as having remained in existence in disassembled form). But if both ships have a title to be deemed numerically identical with the original, that violates Leibniz's law of indiscernibility of identicals.

My favorite resolution of this paradox is of course Simons's.

I suppose there's sorites on the one hand, and the ship of Theseus on the other; you can ask if you still have a heap after taking away a grain, and if you still have the same heap. (People's intuition about the latter might very dramatically.) An external constraint -- this blob is the bronze, meaning all of it, that used to be the statue -- blocks the latter but not the former. If you've lost any, you have to say this is some of the bronze. — Srap Tasmaner

One could stash a heap of sand on the deck of the Ship of Theseus and that may make things more interesting ;-)

One issue with blobs, heaps and chunks is that they are modifiers that turn mass nouns into count nouns. A bag of flour (count noun) isn't quite the same as the flour (mass noun) that's in the bag. The amount of flour that's in the bag can be more or less, but the bag of flour is one. There is an issue, of course, if one buys a bag of flour: how much flour can be missing before it doesn't count as a full bag of flour anymore? And that may depend on what's written on the bag (10kg, say). This is where a specific issue of vagueness arises.

Back to the statue. If one chips away at the bronze statue of Hermes with a scissor, then there will come a point where what remains isn't a statue of Hermes anymore. Likewise if you would hammer it flat. There will come a point where it's not recognizably a statue of Hermes anymore. And the issue of vagueness also arises in this case. It may not be possible to say exactly after how many blows of the hammer the statue doesn't exist anymore, as opposed to its merely being a badly damaged statue (or its having turned into a statue of D.J.T., possibly.)

So, when a sortal concept such as statue provides criteria of persistence and individuation, those criteria can specify (in accordance with common understanding) how much stuff can be taken away, or replaced, or how much the form can be altered, etc., before the statue is deemed not to exist anymore. And issues of vagueness may arise in all cases. Sometimes, such issues are settled in court.

There's a sense of 'object' on which a heap of sand would not be considered an object, but you can perhaps invent a story where it would be natural to call it an object. — Fafner

I think vagueness issues are orthogonal to the question of the mass noun versus count noun distinction. Hence one might ask if a mountain that has two identifiable peaks really is just one mountain or two mountains. That is a separate question from the question whether mountains are material objects or rather are a sort of stuff. They clearly are the former as a matter of ordinary linguistic practice (since "mountain" is conventionally used as a count noun) but we could imagine a reformed language that would identify "mountain-stuff" as the presence of abnormal elevation along the surface a continuous terrain. We'd say: "there is much mountain-stuff over there..."

Likewise, I think heaps are discrete entities, but saying so just is a grammatical remark. It's not due to anything intrinsic to the structure of actual heaps (although regarding the vagueness issue about heaps, Timothy Williamson has strange ideas about them).

I'm thinking that for a given theory, some ways of refining or extending it will be natural and some will be ad hoc. So naturalness is also theory-relative. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree. Natural scientists aim at carving "nature" at its joints. But the natural joints just are the joints that show up in empirical inquiry when the inquirer privileges matter over form, and intrinsic properties over relational properties. Since forms and relations aren't any less real than material and intrinsic properties are, this all amounts to an arbitrary restriction of the definitions of "nature". Such a restriction of the concept of nature may reflect a "fundamentalist" tendency (as when one speaks of physics being a more fundamental science than biology is, say) or a reductionistic tendency.

Actually I think that would be a measure of how the theory refinement is done, not that it has been refined. — Srap Tasmaner

Agreed. One is more of an act of theoretical reason while the other is more of an act of practical reason. Either we are seeking to disclose affordances of the natural world, or we are seeking to produce new technical and/or social affordances (or we are engaging in some combinations of both theoretical and practical endeavors).

(On edit: I'm still talking about our general activity of defining and/or instituting and/or discovering sortal concepts.)

(and there's a further question about which set exactly defines this or that piece of matter: If I remover one molecule of copper from some piece of copper, would would it be no longer the same piece of copper?) — Fafner

It likely remains the same piece of copper but, if it didn't belong to you to start with, that might constitute theft!

I guess I'm just still unclear what we're supposed to have learned about "meaning." — Srap Tasmaner

I don't know. So far, I have mostly been concerned with clarifying possible misunderstandings. If there still is a mystery lurking it's quite possible that it is also a mystery for me.

So we're abolishing any distinction between natural and ad hoc sortals. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think so since the substance-sortals that we use to individuate artifacts or other sorts of objects that we care about aren't merely ad hoc, on the one hand, and also "natural sortals" (e.g. concepts of natural kinds such as chemical elements of biological species) also respond to specific theoretical and technical interests that we have, on the other hand.

Yes, I think that's the sort of thing I'm saying. We could say that dummyness is theory-relative, and that Travis's argument is that there is no final theory possible, in which all dummyness has been eliminated. But there is the built-in corollary that we can always eliminate dummyness by a refinement of our theory, so I'm still unclear on what conclusion is to be drawn. — Srap Tasmaner

I think what you just said (including the corollary) is good enough a conclusion to be drawn!

Why isn't set membership enough? — Srap Tasmaner

If you are a mereological essentialist then set membership is sufficient (and furthermore necessary!) But even if you aren't a mereological essentialist -- as you probably shouldn't be on my view -- then, in some cases, set membership might the relevant identity criterion associated to a sortal concept. A married couple, say, doesn't remain the same married couple through replacement of one of the spouses!

Yet again it is a question of interest and purpose. Are we sure there will turn out to be sortals that are never dummy sortals? — Srap Tasmaner

A sortal that isn't a dummy is a sortal that is merely good enough for the job at hand. A similar question could be asked about meanings, generally. A explanation of the meaning of a world could be a dummy explanation, in a sense, if it would fails to disambiguate two different ways this word could be used to convey two separate meanings, in a specific context. If it is unambiguous in this context, then the definition is good enough. But even after disambiguation has occurred and two senses have been distinguished and explained, we can always imagine a new context -- Charles Travis excels at this -- where the word used in one of those previously explained senses is ambiguous again.

It's not perfectly clear that what you call here the "lump of bronze" that constitutes the statue is an object at all. It feels more like a mereological sum of bronze bits. Your question might still be ambiguous, but not between two further determinations of a generic sortal, but between the object and the stuff it's made of (which is not an object).

If I tell you to move the statue, I'll expect you to keep it in intact. If I tell to clear the snow from the front walk of our museum, it's okay for you to change the configurations of the bits of snow, let some of them melt, etc. Swapping object and stuff in those examples would have dramatic and peculiar consequences. — Srap Tasmaner

No contest there. In the case of artifacts, it's very much our own interests that determine what degree of change in material constitution can be tolerated before an object will count as being destroyed. Hence, our attitude towards historical artifacts, sacred relics, or functional artifacts may vary widely. Incidentally, that's precisely how Peter Simons most elegantly solves the paradox of the Ship of Theseus in Parts: A Study in Ontology, Clarendon Press, 2000.

According to Simons, ship is something of a dummy sortal since some people may be interested in Theseus's ship qua historical artifact, or buy it in order to make use of it as a fishing boat. Those two diverging interests would coordinate with two different substance-sortals. There is, in effect, two different sorts of ship at the same place and at the same time. The planks that are making it up at a time are something else entirely. One of those ships (the fishing boat) is resilient to the replacement of the planks (and may even mandate such replacements as part of necessary maintenance), while the historical artifact isn't.

What do you mean by 'dummy sortal'? — Fafner

Consider the case of material constitution. At a given time, a particular lump of bronze can materially constitute a particular statue of Hermes. Both the properties lump of bronze and statue are substance-sortal concepts because they have associated with them (among other things) principles of persistence and individuation. When one grasps what it is for an object to exemplify a given sortal concept, one thereby grasps what the conditions are under which such an object persists in time or is destroyed. (This may of course be in large part a matter of convention regarding objects of those types). Hence, if the statue is being hammered flat, it is destroyed but the lump of bronze that was constituting it persists under a different form. We can also imagine circumstances where it makes sense to say that a statue survives the exchange of its original material constituents (through successive acts of restoration, say).

Both the statue and the lump of bronze constituting it at a time are material objects. Material object, though, is a dummy sortal because there is a need for further specification in order that a principle of identity be applied to an object that falls under it. In fact, further specification of a dummy sortal is required in order that reference to a particular material object be secured at all, even in cases where the act of reference occurs by means of demonstration rather than definite description.

For instance, suppose I were to point to a statue of Hermes and ask you whether this "object" that I am pointing at might survive being hammered flat. You can't answer unless I would specify whether I am talking about the lump of bronze, or the statue, or something else maybe. If I insist that I am thinking merely of "this material object", whatever it is, then my question is meaningless (or, at any rate, confused).

So, my view (following Wiggins and Marcus) regarding event-types is similar. The general category event, just like the general category material object, is a dummy sortal since it isn't, in the general case, specific enough to determine conditions of persistence and individuation for events.

Wouldn't quotation marks signify an utterance? How could you know the sense without knowing the context of the utterance? — Mongrel

Well, of course, I assumed it was indeed implied that those words have reference only in the context of an utterance. Fafner was proposing an analogy with the case of the references of "the son of of Edward VIII" and "the father of Elizabeth II" that are the same in spite of their (Fregean) senses being different on some occasions of use. So, I made the point that, on my view, "Caesar's murder" and "Caesar's death" don't merely have different senses but also different references on account of murder and death being distinct event-types. This is a difference at the level of reference, and not at the level of sense, or so I would argue.

But I also made the concession, after more exchanges with Fafner and Srap Tasmaner, that there are pragmatic contexts where both words -- "murder" and "death" -- might be regarded as referring to the same event-type, for all practical purposes, and hence that one might refer to the same event as either "Caesar's murder" or "Caesar's death".

Around Ceasars murder... there were quotes. So it was kind of bizarre considering the title of the thread that a discussion ensued about the reference of the words. — Mongrel

Ah! Sorry. I thought you were referring to the original post in this thread. Fafner indeed used quotes around Ceasar's murder. I am unsure what it is that you find bizarre or that I may have missed regarding the significance of those quotation marks.

We utter sentences in order to express propositions. You have to look to context to know what proposition was expressed. You can't look at the words and know the reference, but just a possible reference. Did Frege disagree with this?

Frege wouldn't disagree. He made a big point that you can know the reference (Bedeutung) of a word only through grasping its sense (Sinn). Frege's explanation of sense (Sinn), though, is very much different from what has come to be known as linguistic meaning: something akin to a tacit rule, or definite description, that language users make use of to determine the reference. He also was reaching for an ideal language free of ambiguities and imprecision, but that's something else.

Exactly. Whereas the original question in this thread involved quotes. I think you have a tendency to ignore the significance of that. — Mongrel

I got involved in this thread when I reacted to what someone said, after the discussion was well on its way. But I just now looked back at the original post and I am unsure what you are driving at. What quotes?

I can't pass quoting another bit from Eric Marcus, Rational Causation. This is footnote 22 on p.195:

"Someone might object here that two people (e.g., J. J. Thompson(sic) and Anscombe), neither of whom could be said to grasp the ordinary concept of a murder better than the other, might disagree about the temporal boundaries of a murder and thus disagree about the principle of identity for murders. The concept of a murder, it will be said, is inherently murky. One might thus conclude that there is no determinate principle of identity for murder and perhaps for many other event-types as well. This might well be true; but if it is, it only strengthens the analogy with the principles of identity associated with different kinds of object. For one can analogously argue that an ordinary grasp of such concepts as ship, caterpillar, and person does not furnish one with definite answers to every question that might arise over the survival of a particular ship, caterpillar, or person. To argue that such murkiness undermines principles of identity for object-sortals and event-types across the board would, in effect, be to argue that there are no facts about the identity of objects and events. I take this to be an unacceptable result." --Eric Marcus (bold in the original)

Bloody murder! I had read that five years ago and quite forgotten that Marcus had chosen murder as an example. He used a bold type for murder to mark it as an event-type, a sortal concept.

"J. J. Thompson" is actually J. J. Thomson. Elizabeth Anscombe and him had had a disagreement over the interpretation of the doctrine of double effect.

I don't believe that conceptual inquiry is a way to 'disclose' the essential metaphysical nature of things (and therefore I also reject the idea of a synthetic apriori truth, at least on the traditional understanding of the term), and this is perhaps where our disagreement lies. — Fafner

I don't believe that either. You brought up the case of Kripke's a posteriori necessities regarding the essences of natural kinds, specifically. (I'd rather speak of essences since I view the claimed "identity" of water and H2O as a matter of necessary material constitution, and, following Wiggins, I am distinguishing identity and constitution). In response to that I insisted that what can be known only on the basis of experience need not be, for that reason alone, outside of the scope of inquiry about meaning, as I take Kant to have shown (as I once argued here and there).

I think that in some sense it is an arbitrary matter whether we say that two events are identical or not (like a death and a murder), and it is a confusion in my opinion to think that analyzing the concepts "death" and "murder" can tell you the 'real' answer from the perceptive of the events 'themselves' as it were (and please correct me if I'm wrong, but I read you as saying that there is an objective answer to this question, which is determined by the nature of the events in the world).

I agree that it is only in relation to a specific practical context, and our purposes in that context, that a death and a murder can be subsumed under the event-types (the equivalent of substance-sortals for events) that individuate them. My claim was that it isn't generally the case that they will turn out, under those pragmatic conditions, to identify the same event. And that's in part because 'event' is a dummy sortal. But I had made the concession, while responding to Srap Tasmaner's useful suggestion, that what is merely a dummy sortal, in one pragmatic context, might provide a fine-grained enough principle of individuation , in another context of inquiry (e.g. a murder investigation) to individuate the murder and the death in such a way that they are conceived to be identical events (under 'two different descriptions' we might say).

So, I am not seeking 'real' answers, but only objective truths. Objective truths can be truths about secondary qualities of objects, say, or socially instituted facts (such as the value of a currency) so objective and subjective aren't contraries.

I agree that concepts are world-involving as you said, but not by a way of reflecting the metaphysical essences of things. However, it is also not the case on my view (and I agree with you here) that "investigation into the objects, kinds and properties that our words purport to refer to is something that occurs outside of the bounds of the conceptual".

That's my main point.

There's a wonderful paper by Putnam called Rethinking Mathematical Necessity that explores this topic further. — Fafner

Thanks for this reference. It is Putnam's endorsement of Travis that motivated me to read Unshadowed Thought. Now, I think I may have developed some reservations regarding Travis's understanding of Frege, but that would be a topic for another time!

One problem with facts is how to tell when one fact is the same as another. There's no fat man in my doorway. There's no thin man in my doorway, either. Two facts or one or none? Perhaps there's just One Big Fact to which all true statements refer - which gets around the problem of fact-identity. — Cuthbert

According to the slingshot argument there indeed only is one single fact that all true sentences correspond to. The arguments, though, has also been viewed as a refutation of the correspondence theory of truth.

If I may just throw out a suggestion, in passing, regarding the requirement (or lack of a requirement) for there to be a convention in order that communication could be meaningful. I haven't managed to read all of the recent exchanges between StreetlightX and Srap Tasmaner. But it had seemed to to that StreetlightX was suggesting that words can be used in specific ways to achieve meaningful communication without there being an established convention for using them in that way; and Srap Tasmaner was disagreeing.

StreetlightX had also mentioned at some point, if I remember, that words are used meaningfully if the way they are used is, in a sense, conventionalizable. And that would be sufficient for effective communication to occur even if no convention already exists. That seems right to me.

But I was also reminded of Charles Travis's example of the plant with green leaves. Srap Tasmaner had brought it up to illustrate the occasion-sensitivity of meaning. (That was actually Fafner, sorry). In some contexts, if one were to request some green leaved interior plant and were offered a brown leaved interior plant that had had its leaves painted green, that would likely not satisfy her request. But if she rather had needed some decor prop for a photo-shoot, then it might have. The point of the request, which is assumed to be understood by the interlocutor, can determine what does or does not satisfy the predicate "...green" as meant by the requester. The question then is: must there be an established practice for using the predicate "...green" in just that sense for the question to be understood? And the answer would seem to be no. All that's required is that the interlocutor has a grasp of the point of the request, and this understanding may only requires something like agreement in form of life (including, possibly, a shared local culture).

Nevertheless, if there happens to be a general context where the request for a "green leaved plant" is meant to be understood to have the specific point mentioned above, then it might come to be expected that the predicate "green..." will be used in that way whenever such a general context reoccurs. This use will thus come to be conventionalized. And from that point on, the expression will be misused, and not merely misunderstood, when someone misinterprets it in that general context. What has happened, effectively, after the use has become conventionalized is that what was formerly a route from apprehension of the requester's intention to the apprehension of the (occasion sensitive) meaning of her utterance, now has become a route from the apprehension of the (conventional) meaning of her words to the apprehension of her communicative intention.

(Edited to add links to earlier comments)

I agree that at least on some cases we can know just on conceptual grounds that the same thing cannot satisfy two different description if it doesn't make sense to say that it does (e.g. to describe something both as an animal and as an inanimate object at the same time). But sometimes such identities can become aposteriori discoverable possibilities, as Kripke and Putnam have taught us about natural kinds. The interesting question here is what distinguishes the two cases and how can you know when you are confronted with the one or the other. And this brings me to another interesting thing that you said. — Fafner

I think this is just a misunderstanding, so let me try and clear that up separately.

On my view, which is indebted to Evans's and Wiggins's neo-Fregean re-appropriations of Putnam and Kripke on the semantics of natural kind terms (as well as the metaphysics of natural kinds) just because the manner in which our words reach out to their referents can't be determined through linguistic analysis alone (where such an analytical activity is construed to be achieved from the armchair only) it doesn't follow that investigation into the objects, kinds and properties that our words purport to refer to is something that occurs outside of the bounds of the conceptual. Empirical inquiry oftentimes is the proper way for us to clarify our concepts (or, our 'conceptions', as Wiggins would characterize the Fregean senses of natural kind terms) and to better anchor them into the essential natures we seek to disclose (when there are any). What Kripke would call a posteriori (metaphysically-)necessary, though, rather corresponds to what Strawson, Sellars or Kant would call a priori, or synthetic a priori, in the case of Kant; and to what Wittgenstein calls grammatical remarks. None of those inquiries are done from the armchair, but rather are reflective inquiries into our public language games. And those language games are world involving. It's only in this sense that they are 'a posteriori'.

(A little while ago, I had posted links to a couple older posts of mine, about Kant, Sellars and Haugeland, where I sought to explain the relavant sense of synthetic a priori. That water may turn out to be H2O, on that account, and therefore 'twin-water' not to be water, would be sythetic a priori even though it can only be known by means of experiments.)

Thinking of this as a "more complete description" led me almost immediately to the concern you noted, that I would need to posit "fully determinate facts" at the head of such sets, and that seems a bit dubious. — Srap Tasmaner

Before responding to this, and also to Fafner's most recent reply to me, I wanted to read again chapter 5 -- Events and States -- in Eric Marcus, Rational Causation, HUP 2012, a brilliant book that I had last read five years ago. It is especially relevant to our present discussion since it explains sortal concepts for substances, and event-type concepts for events, as both being in the business of providing identity principles for them. While Marcus was bringing up Wiggins's discussion of 'dummy sortals' (such as 'object' or 'thing'), I wrote down the following note this morning:

"Or 'mammal'?

Maybe we could say that 'mammal' is a determinable sortal. If does some of the job of individuation, but not all of it until it has been further determined into a species concept.

Maybe this idea provides the sought after stopping points for Srap Tasmaner's "cofinal tails". Determinable properties and dummy sortals don't determine such tails, but substance-sortals and event-types possibly do since they determine as fully as one might want *what* something is. Further, specifications (or further determinations of determinables) beyond such a natural stopping point only achieves the specification of merely accidental properties (including such things as the accidental microphysical realization or material constitution of events or substances.

Where occasion sensitivity might play a role, among other places, is where determination of some determinable has established membership in an equivalence class that is thereby fine-grained just enough to satisfy some practical purpose (including the founding of a meaning convention for effective communication, in some cases."

Here is the relevant paragraph from Rational Causation:

"I hold, then, that objects instantiate sortals and that to instantiate a sortal is at least in part for there to be a principle of identity that determines the conditions under which the object persists. Objects, however, do not instantiate principles of identity as such, but rather only insofar as
they are particular sorts of objects. Here is how Wiggins puts the idea: "If a is the same as b, then it must also hold that a is the same something as b,"7 where something is a quantifier ranging over determinate sortals. Or, if a is the same as b, there must be an answer to the 'same what?' question. To say that object is not a true sortal is to say that it is not a proper answer to the 'same what?' question. In saying that a is an object, we do not say what a is. Wiggins thus distinguishes 'dummy sortals,' such as object and thing from genuine sortals such as dog and table. Terms for dummy sortals share the grammar of terms for true sortals (e.g., they are modified by articles and quantifiers), but are not associated with a principle of identity." -- Eric Marcus, Rational Causation, p. 187 (bolds and italics in the original).

I'll finish re-reading the whole chapter before responding more fully to this and another reply of yours.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but I have two questions (which are related): a) are you claiming that one can know the Fregean reference solely by virtue of knowing the meaning of the relevant predicates? (which clearly you can't since you cannot know apriori whether "Caesar" and "the conqueror of Gaul" denote the same person) — Fafner

No, of course not. First I was talking about the references of the predicates -- "...died" and "...was murdered" -- and not the references of the singular terms. And our knowledge of the references of the terms (or predicates) can be empirical, or gained through testimony, or (on Gareth Evan's account -- see chapter 11 in The Varieties of Reference) derived from our being "consumers" in a socially instituted naming practice in which some other individuals -- the "producers" -- who are directly acquainted with the named individual (or with the designated property) are participating (or participated).

Secondly, my claim was that the two events are numerically distinct by dint of the predicates "...died" and "...was murdered" referring to different sorts of actions/processes regardless of anyone's knowledge of the references of those predicates. But, of course, our knowledge of them, when we know them, isn't generally derived a priori form linguistic meanings except in the special case of so called "nominal definitions". (Though, how much can be inferred from knowledge of linguistic meaning might vary depending how you relate the idea of linguistic meaning to the Fregean concepts of sense and reference, and what the scope of linguistic 'analysis' might be. If such analysis is allowed to cover the examination of public language games for instance...)

and b) Is "the conqueror of Gaul" a rigid designator on your account? Because if it is not (and it is plain that it isn't) then I think your criteria for the non-identity of 'x' and 'y' (in the quote) becomes vacuous. Because consider that it is a contingent fact that "Caesar" and "the conqueror of Gaul" denote the same person (and you can further substitute 'Caesar' with another description to eliminate all names); but this you can know only aposteriori, so it means that on your criteria 'x' and 'y' (if 'x' and 'y' are definite descriptions) denote the same entity if their terms happen to denote the same entity, and of course everyone will agree with that...

But all I was suggesting was that, just in case Caesar wasn't the conqueror of Gaul in the actual world, then it trivially follows that the event of Caesar's death is numerically distinct from the event of that other guy's death. And so it is, I am arguing, if the event- of process-forms that specify the two event types are different. (I draw the concept of an event- or process-form from Michael Thompson). The issue is ontological and not directly tied with issues of knowledge or reference. Let me add, though, that while thinking about this case, and about criteria of event individuation, I have gained a better appreciation of the ground one may have to claim identity between the historical events of Caesar's death and of Caesar's murder. I think the case being discussed, and the implicit surrounding narratives, can be further filled up in such a manner as to warrant either one of the two intuitions depending on the kind of 'sortal concept' (or rather, the kind of 'event- or process-form', for the category of events) that most perspicuously attaches to the events being talked about and thereby determines their criteria of persistence and individuation. But I'll say a bit more about that at a later time; it also connects with the issues of occasion-sensitivity.

I keep thinking, as I suggested in the other thread, that what we want here is sets of propositions ordered by entailment, but it looks like that would have to be relative to a set of assumptions or background knowledge or something. I want Pat's being 5 feet tall to buy you, as a single fact, everything it entails. A separate fact for everything Pat is taller or shorter than seems less than optimal. — Srap Tasmaner

I think this proposal raises a few problematic issues. First, through attempting to do away with the multiple realizability of coarse-grainedly specified facts, it tends to restrict our fundamental ontology to something akin to a 'fundamental' supervenience base like the set of microphysical facts, and that seems to me to be a profound error. Secondly, there is an issue regarding the nature of the entailment relations that are allowed for eliminating entailed 'facts' in favor of the 'real' or 'fully determinate' facts that entail them all. Is it only logical entailments from (ultimately) 'raw' empirical facts that are being allowed or are entailments that make use of premises expressing conceptual truths also allowed? The latter would seem to be the case if the fact that an apple is red is to be derived from the fact that it is crimson. One also needs the conceptual truth (if it is one) that all crimson things are red. (Or, at least, that crimson apples are red). Augmenting our special ontologies with a priori conceptual truths seems problematic to me since conceptual truths rather seem to belong to the transcendental background of those ontologies: the a priori conceptual truths in virtue of which empirical facts can be disclosed to us at all.

(In this post and the following one I had sketched a defence, following Haugeland, of a pragmatized Sellarsian/neo-Kantian conception of 'impure' synthetic a priori statements that are dependent on experience without them being objects of experience -- or without then 'arising from' experience, as Kant would say)

Consider the following case that has been discussed to illustrate 'contrastive' causal explanations: A pigeon has been trained to peck at red objects. A red apple that happens to be crimson is presented to the pigeon and the pigeon pecks at it. The fact that the apple is red, in conjonction with the fact that the pigeon has acquired a disposition to peck at red objects, causally explains why the pigeon pecked at the apple. The fact that the apple is crimson may also explain why the pecking occurred provided we are reminded that crimson is a shade of red. However, causal explanations of events seek not only to determine, on each occasion, why some specific effect followed some specific cause. It is no real explanation that 'explains' only one single occurrence. The real explanation of the fact that the apple was pecked at is that it was red, and this explanation unifies a whole range of similar phenomena (i.e. other instances of the same pigeon pecking at, or failing to pick at, various objects). Hence, the fact the the apple is crimson, unlike the fact that it is red, may fails to provide the real causal ground of its nomological relation with definite ranges of effects. (I may try to come up with a somewhat less contrived example. However, you can refer to the two posts liked above where I discussed an example from Newtonian mechanics and another one from the game of chess.)

There's also a very good paper by john McDowell "The Content of Perceptual Experience" (appears in "Mind, Value and Reality"), that argues for a very similar idea to Hornsby. — Fafner

Seconded. This is a paper that ought to figure in any anthology on the philosophy of mind.

Is that down to philosophical fashion? Or is there something we know that most of cognitive science doesn't? — Srap Tasmaner

Quite possibly. I think cognitive science, by an large, has not kept up with J. J. Gibson, among other anti anti-representationalist pioneers; although there had been a salutatory revival of a variety of embodied/embedded/situated/scaffolded paradigms recently (See Robert A. Wilson, Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences - Cognition, Cambridge University Press, 2004). Cognitive scientists still tend to be mired in psychologism and representationalism when they theorizes about mental abilities and mental states in a way that construe the mind and its operations as being sandwiched in between the "inputs" from the senses and the "outputs" of motor action. (Susan Hurley characterized this as "the classical sandwich model of the mind", which goes hand in hand with representationalism). This is not necessarily damaging when they seek to understand how specific cognitive abilities are being enabled by physiology, for instance, or what are favorable or unfavorable learning conditions for this or that skill being efficiently acquired, etc. But when they theorize about the very 'person-level' skills and phenomena (e.g. the ability to remember or what it is to believe this or that) that they seek to understand, then they are being biased in their theoretical undertakings by inchoate Cartesian-empiricist presuppositions. This is being argued forcefully in Max Bennett and Peter Hacker, The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Wiley-Blackwell, 2003.

Just to be clear, what anti-representationaists such as the authors mentioned above object to isn't the quite reasonable idea that brains and internal cognitive processes enable people to use language, represent the world to be thus and so, and act skilfully in the world. Neither are they denying that we are indeed representing to ourselves the world to be thus and so. Rather, they object to the construal of our abilities to represent the world (and act in it) as a matter of our (or our brains') constructing internal representations that have their contents independently of the form of our engagements in the social/material world (such as our playing language games, or our skilfully exploiting behavioral affordances).

Another paper that is quite relevant to anti-representationalism is Jennifer Hornsby's Personal and sub‐personal; A defence of Dennett's early distinction, Philosophical Exploratons, 3, 1, 2000

But what if somebody meant his murder by "his death?" Wouldn't the reference be the same in that case? — Mongrel

You mean the event she is thinking about and the reference of her utterance?

On edit: I think it's entirely possible that she means to be referring to Caesar's murder when she uses "his death" and be correctly understood thanks to the surrounding conversational context. For all that, someone else could refer to Caesar's death as such, and be referring to a distinct event. One might inquire, for instance: "I heard Caesar bled and suffered for many hours after he had been stabbed. Might not his dying have been abbreviated by his friends?" And this would surely not meant the same as: "Might not his being murdered have been abbreviated by his friends?" And the reason for this, I surmise, is because the murder and the death aren't identical events. (As well, we might say, of the murdering and the dying, which are the same two distinct events, correspondingly, being described from the progressive rather than the perfective grammatical aspects.)

Let me just make a mention of the elephant in the room. Caesar's murder was an action whereas his death wasn't. Intentional actions have a principle of unity quite unlike the principles of unity of natural events and processes. This has been stressed quite a bit in the philosophy of action since the publication of Anscombe's Intention. Here is another relevant paper that I haven't read yet but that is on my very short list: Wittgenstein on Actions, Reasons and Causes