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De Re and De Dicto Explanation of Action

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Abstract

This paper argues for an account of the relation between thought ascription and the explanation of action according to which de re ascriptions and de dicto ascriptions of thought each form the basis for two different kinds of action explanations, nonrationalizing and rationalizing ones. The claim that de dicto ascriptions explain action is familiar and virtually beyond dispute; the claim that that de re ascriptions are explanatory of action, however, is not at all familiar and indeed has mostly been denied by philosophers. I explain how de re ascriptions enter into non-rationalizing explanations of action and how attention to their distinctive explanatory nature reveals flaws in an alternative “dual-component” view about action explanation.

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Notes

  1. See, e.g., Schiffer (1978); Fodor (1980); Dennett (1982); Baker (1982); Lycan (1985); Carruthers (1988), and Boghossian (1994).

  2. See also chapters four and five of Word and Object (Quine, 1960) and ‘Intensions Revisited’ (1977). I develop Quine’s account of attitude ascriptions, and defend it against objections, in much more detail in Crawford (2008), on which the discussion in this section is based.

  3. The move from the failure of substitution to the non-affirmation of any relationship between Ralph and any man appears to be a non sequitur. In chapter 4 of Word and Object, Quine is more cautious. Failure of substitution into a subsentential position does not necessarily indicate that the containing sentence ceases to affirm any relationship at all between person (e.g., Ralph) and object (e.g., Ortcutt); rather, it indicates that the singular term-taking position in the sentence is ‘not purely referential’, where impure referentiality admits of degrees, in which some sentences have ‘more bearing’ on their objects than others (1960, p. 142). (The point that occurrences of singular terms within psychological contexts can serve both to relate the thinker to an object and characterise how he thinks of that object was later noticed by a number of authors, Loar (1972) among them. Discussion of and references to this ‘double duty’ view of singular terms can be found in Burge (1977). So Quine’s well-known thesis that ‘a position that resists substitutivity of identity cannot meaningfully be quantified’ (1986a, p. 291), as applied to attitude ascriptions, cannot be defended on the grounds that the substitution-resistant position within a sentence indicates that that sentence does not affirm a relationship between a person and an object. However, there are other good reasons for thinking that there is a tension in the case of attitude ascription between failure of substitution and quantifying in. As Graeme Forbes (1996) has argued, ‘the cautious version of [Quine’s thesis] claims only that there is a certain range of cases of substitution failure that involve a mechanism incompatible with quantifying in’ and that ‘The puzzle is that although attitude ascriptions seem on general grounds to belong to this range … we have the particular example of [(2)] to indicate otherwise’ (p. 338).

  4. It is important not to confuse the two senses of belief posited by the rejected proposal, which is sustained for all of one small paragraph, with Quine’s notional and relational senses of belief. This conflation is very widespread in discussions of Quine’s argument. I try to clear up the confusion in Crawford (2008).

  5. See also Quine 1960, §35 and 1977. The idea is in effect a reworking of Russell’s (1910) ‘multiple relation’ theory of judgement, with — contrary to the whole point of Russell’s theory — the addition of propositions as possible intentional relata.

  6. Quine’s proposal here is the proto-type for many later accounts, such as Wallace (1972); Loar (1972); Burge (1977, 1982) and Forbes (1996).

  7. This linguistic criterion is present in Q&PA but it is more explicit in Word and Object; see especially pp. 145, 148 of Quine, 1960. A different and very interesting account of the idea that de dicto attributions implicitly contain attributions of beliefs about language—“de lingua beliefs”—is given by Fiengo and May (2006). Although their account places central emphasis on the subjects’ beliefs about the semantic values of sub-sentential expressions, particularly proper names, I believe their account delivers essentially the same results as the Quinean one presented here.

  8. Quine, 1956, pp. 188–89 and 1960, p. 148.

  9. To the best of my knowledge, Tomkow (1992) was the first to argue this explicitly, and I first learned of it in seminars he delivered at Dalhousie University in 1992.

  10. Kripke’s (1979) stories about Pierre and Peter are not counter examples to the claim that the “constraints of reason” prohibit the joint truth of (10) and (11). For, to take the second case, it is part of Kripke’s story that Peter takes the two occurrences of the proper name ‘Paderewski’ in the two sentences he accepts (‘Paderewski had musical talent’ and ‘Paderewski did not have musical talent’) to refer to different men; that is, he understands the two occurrences of ‘Paderewski’ differently. In contrast, it is part of Quine’s story that in the situation imagined in which (10) and (11) are both true, Ralph understands the two occurrences of ‘Ortcutt’ in the two sentences he accepts (‘Ortcutt is a spy’ and ‘Ortcutt is not a spy’) to refer to one and the same man. This is why Ralph would be irrational while Peter is not. In the useful “de lingua belief” framework of Fiengo and May’s (2006, chapter 2) account of de dicto attributions, we can say that whereas Ralph believes one ‘Ortcutt’-Assignment, Peter believes two ‘Paderewski’-Assignments; that is, both occurrences of the co-spelled expression ‘Ortcutt’ are co-valued by Ralph, and are therefore different occurrences of the same expression, whereas the two occurrences of the co-spelled expression ‘Paderewski’ are not co-valued by Peter and so are occurrences of different co-spelled expressions. Charges of irrationality concern de dicto ascriptions of belief in contrary contents to a subject where the subject believes only one Assignment.

  11. E.g., Baker, 1982; Noonan, 1986, 1991; Segal, 1989; Carruthers, 1987; Blackburn, 1984, ch. 9. Dual-component theories of psychological explanation should not be confused with dual-component theories of mental content or meaning, such as that found in McGinn (1982), though I think it is natural to expect a dual-component theorist about content to be a dual-component theorist about explanation and vice-versa.

  12. Many philosophers (e.g., Noonan, 1986, 1991; Segal, 1989; Carruthers, 1987; Blackburn, 1984, ch. 9) try to use the model as part of an argument against the existence of the so-called “object-dependent” thoughts of Gareth Evans (1982) and John McDowell (1984, 1986). Object-dependent thoughts are thought whose identity and existence depends on the identity and existence of their objects. The argument against them, briefly, is that reference to object-dependent thoughts is “redundant” in the psychological explanation of intentional action because the D-C model suffices to explain all cases of intentional action upon objects. Since object-dependent thoughts play no essential role in such explanations their very existence is called into question. The argument is criticized in Crawford (1998).

  13. Indeed, the redundancy argument against object-dependent thought (see previous mote) turns essentially on the assumption that a deluded, hallucinating twin of a subject who does not act on any object performs a no less rational action than his non-hallucinating and non-deluded twin who does act on an object; in other words, they both have their reasons for trying to do what they are trying to do.

  14. Crawford (1998). Cf. Peacocke (1981, 1993) and Morton (1975).

  15. Noonan (1991) attempts to get around the example of veridical hallucination by appealing to a distinction between accidentally true belief and knowledge. The attempt is countered by Crawford (1998).

  16. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for helping me to see more clearly what the implications of my account of de re and de dicto explanation are for the D-C model and also for further comments that prompted changes that have resulted in an improvement on the original submission.

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Crawford, S. De Re and De Dicto Explanation of Action. Philosophia 40, 783–798 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9367-4

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