Actions and Intentions

Abstract

Results in the cognitive neuroscience of volition and action have been often dismissed as ultimately irrelevant, or too week at best, to legitimately tackle the philosophical issues of free will and intentional agency. By contrast, this chapter seeks to promote a more constructive perspective regarding how philosophy and cognitive neuroscience can jointly improve our comprehension of intentional agency. The chapter is divided into seven sections. In Section 2, I present the causal theory of action as the best attempt to provide a reductive philosophical characterisation of intentional action, introducing some early and ongoing debates concerning the causal role of conscious mental states. In Section 3, I discuss how specific problems for the understanding of intentional agency, as inherited from the causal theory, originate from widely discussed pieces of empirical evidence on how voluntary processes unfold. In Section 4, I go through some of the counter-arguments that have been put forward in order to defend the classic view of intentional agency. To a various extent, these counter-arguments target the lack of ecological validity of widely employed experimental paradigms. In Section 5, I present counter-arguments of a different type, which are based on the underlying claim that no clear causal link between unconscious neural antecedents and actions can be established on the basis of neuroscientific data. The preoccupation expressed by some of these criticisms is shareable. Nonetheless, I will suggest that the following argument is unwarranted: Because it does not straightforwardly rule out the causal theory, the neuroscientific angle is irrelevant to understanding intentional agency. In Section 6, I in fact argue in favour of a different approach concerning the relation between experimental research and philosophical analysis. In particular, I suggest that the former does not simply have the role of validating the latter, but plays a more constructive part in defining the common research target. I articulate these claims with some proposals and examples (Subsections 6.1 and 6.2). Some final remarks are presented in Section 7.