Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will

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In Effective Intentions Alfred Mele shows that the evidence offered to support these claims is sorely deficient. He also shows that there is strong empirical support for the thesis that some conscious decisions and intentions have a genuine place in causal explanations of corresponding actions.

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In short, there is weighty evidence of the existence of effective conscious intentions or the power of conscious will. Mele examines the accuracy of subjects' reports about when they first became aware of decisions or intentions in laboratory settings and develops some implications of warranted skepticism about the accuracy of these reports. In addition, he explores such questions as whether we must be conscious of all of our intentions and why scientists disagree about this.

Mele's final chapter closes with a discussion of imaginary scientific findings that would warrant bold claims about free will and consciousness of the sort he examines in this book. Conscious Intentions and Decisions 3. Neuroscience and Causes of Action 4. Neuroscience and Free Will 5. Proximal Intentions and Awareness Reports 7. Throughout the book he evinces a willingness to take experimental data very seriously. He goes so far as to outline hypothetical experimental results that -- were they demonstrated -- would lead him to accept, variously, epiphenomenalism about proximal intentions i.

So, there is an honest engagement with the experimental data that should cheer those who favor such projects.

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At the core of the book, though, is the business of showing how there is a plausible, systematic, and principled alternative interpretation to the experimental data to which willusionists frequently appeal. Mele opens the book by showing why we should want to distinguish between, for example, desires, decisions, and intentions -- at least if we wish to make sense of action in a way that is continuous with ordinary explanations of it.

One can, of course, reject this latter project, which seeks to understand the nature and structure of action partly in terms of the distinctions grounded in our ordinary vocabulary of action explanations. Indeed, there is some sense in which rejecting this project is precisely the aim of Mele's interlocutors.

However, inasmuch as their arguments depend on showing that conventional explanations of action are falsified by experimental data, then their characterization of conventional explanations of action needs to be accurate. It is on precisely this latter point -- the accuracy with which willusionists have characterized the resources of our standard explanations of action -- that Mele makes trouble for willusionists. Over a series of chapters, Mele illustrates how most willusionists are working with a startlingly crude picture of agency.

So, for example, Wegner claims that " Intention is normally understood as an idea of what one is going to do that appears in consciousness just before one does it" quoted on Mele Mele points out that this is neither necessary nor sufficient for being an intention. It is not necessary, because distal intentions can occur to agents long before one does some action, and indeed, the doing of the action does not obviously require that the distal intention spring to mind at the moment of action. It is not sufficient, either, as Wegner's characterization is too coarse-grained to distinguish intentions from predictions.

2009.09.17

I might predict that I am about to hit a car such that "the idea of what one is going to do appears in conscious just before one does it" , but it does not follow that I thereby intend to hit the car. Such distinctions may sound simple, perhaps even nit-picky. Effective Intentions shows why this reaction is in error.

One particularly important idea that emerges in the book is this: That is, Mele suggests that one might have nonconscious intentions. Neuroscientific willusionists have overlooked this possibility, and Mele thinks that the plausibility of our having such attitudes, and their role in the production of action, undermines almost every interesting argument for willusionism.

How this works is both ingenious and, at least in retrospect, surprisingly straightforward. For example, Wegner maintains that conscious intentions arrive too late on the scene to be involved in action production. To make his argument work, Wegner appeals to a diverse range of studies including some of Libet's , most of which rely on an agent's report of their beliefs about when they became conscious of an intention to act. If there are nonconscious intentions, however, these data will not show that intentions have no role in the production of action.

Effective Intentions

At best, they indicate the timing of when an agent came to have a belief about when he or she became aware of a conscious proximal intention to act. Even better, Mele goes on to show why there is some reason to think that there is a nonconscious intention operating in the causal sequence, even if the agent is not consciously aware of its presence or role in the production of action.

Several brief points of clarification are in order. First, Mele's notion of a nonconscious intention is not presented as an invocation of a more general Freudian framework. Mele's notion of a nonconscious intention makes no appeal to an active, unconscious agency that is in some sense at cross-purposes with consciousness. Such an account may be consistent with Mele's conception of nonconscious intentions, but his account of nonconscious intentions does not require it to be. Second, Mele treads lightly around whether nonconscious intentions properly count as intentions.

Mele seems to endorse the idea that there is likely some attitude or mental entity or its physical realizer that has the basic functional properties as proximal intentions, but that, at least sometimes, is nonconscious.

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However, the details of his argument tend to proceed in a somewhat conditional way: So, as important as the idea is to the book, it is a bit unclear about just how much Mele takes himself to be committed to the existence of honest-to-goodness intentions that are nonconscious. Although Mele is not the first or only person to have suggested the possibility of nonconscious intentions, there has been comparatively little discussion of this idea in both the neuroscience literature and in contemporary philosophy of action.

Hence, Mele's invocation and use of the idea is an important development. It does raise some questions about how such intentions operate, and their tractability in a broadly causal, naturalistic explanatory framework. For example, how might we identify the presence of a nonconscious intention? What makes the difference with respect to whether a given intention is conscious or not? Does consciousness make a difference and if so, what difference? Mele acknowledges that some might be inclined to think that consciousness of that intention is somehow built in to the very idea of an intention.

Wegner and Bargh, for example, assume that intentions must be conscious. We might wonder whether proponents of such a view, now that they are so pressed, might generate some account of why consciousness is an essential feature of intentions.

As Mele notes, however, the very idea of nonconscious intentions should not seem especially bizarre for those who think about intentions in terms of functional roles: Indeed, Mele declares that he can think of "no good argument for the conceptual thesis that necessarily all proximal intentions are conscious intentions" On Mele's account the possibility of nonconscious intentions is not meant to exclude the possibility that there are virtues to being conscious of intentions.

In chapter 7, Mele considers ways in which consciousness of intentions might make them particularly efficacious he focuses on implementation intentions, or more specific intentions concerning how some distal intention is to be executed. Even if we can provide a broadly functionalist account of intentions that does not require their being conscious, Mele is sanguine about the possibility that whatever those functional roles are, they might well be supplemented or enhanced by consciousness in distinctive ways.

At any rate, the idea is an intriguing one, and merits considerable discussion among philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use for details see www.

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