Goals, No-Goals and Own Goals

A Debate on Goal-Directed and Intentional Behaviour

Alan Montefiore,Denis Noble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000415070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

First published in 1989, Goals, No-Goals and Own Goals presents a stimulating debate between three scientists and three philosophers about the significance and nature of goal-directed and intentional behaviour. At one extreme David McFarland brings into radical question the need for either of these concepts, at least in the scientific study of animal behaviour. At the other extreme, Alan Montefiore argues that such concepts are indispensable to any explication of the meaningful use of language and that we must therefore acknowledge their importance in understanding the nature of human behaviour. Denis Noble uses arguments drawn from computer science and physiology to show that it is incorrect to regard intentions as causes of neural events, even though it is correct to regard intentionality as responsible for our actions. Shawn Lockery outlines how intentional behaviour might be subjected to physiological study. Kathy Wilkes widens the debate by asking some basic questions about the nature of explanation and finally, Daniel Dennett argues how the study of animal behaviour might inform research in Artificial Intelligence.

This book will be a useful resource for scholars and researchers of cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, linguistics and physiology.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Alan Montefiore and Denis Noble

This volume is intended to provide an interdisciplinary approach to some of the many intertangled problems connected with the identification, characterisation, understanding and explanation of goal-directed and intentional behaviour. In fact, this very opening sentence of what is ‘intended’ as our own introduction to our own volume also presents itself as a telling example of the problems with which we are concerned; for it contains what appears as an unabashedly straightforward declaration of would-be intention. But one of the most intricate set of issues addressed in the discussions that follow turns around the disputed significance (or lack of significance) of the fact (if it is indeed a fact) that we human beings, we speakers and writers of language, seem to be unable to argue or even to think ourselves free of such reliance on reference to or signalling of our own intentions.

This volume has, then, six authors, half of them professional scientists, half of them professional philosophers. Their contributions are not, however, to be found aligned on opposite sides of some imaginary line separating the ‘scientific’ from the ‘philosophical’ point of view. On the contrary, on just about every major issue the scientists were to be found tending towards disagreement with other scientists just as the philosophers with other philosophers, while members of each ‘professional group’ could look to find allies as well as dissentients from among members of the other. The lines of debate cross and re-cross that of any boundary that might be drawn to distinguish scientists from philosophers. That boundary is here more discernible in the differing experience and expertise of those who have been trained to work in either one field or the other. But even this boundary contains numerous crossing points. The scientists here involved are well read in at least some major areas of the professional philosophical literature — indeed, one of them has contributed to it; while the philosophers have been particularly concerned, so far as they are competent to do so, to take the findings of the relevant scientific disciplines into account.

However, this situation is not, it should be stressed, accidental; the interdisciplinary nature of this volume does not consist in its simply having been put together on the basis of ad hoc contributions specially invited from representatives of different disciplines. Rather it has its origins in successive series of seminars, together with many surrounding discussions, in which all but one of the present authors have been engaged in Oxford over the last two decades. This is not to say that any one of those five has taken part in all of those seminars and discussions. Still less should it be taken as either forgetful or unappreciative of all those many other participants who have appeared in these ongoing debates — colleagues and students alike, philosophers, psychologists, physiologists, animal behaviourists and many others — whose criticisms, objections, questions, suggestions and general stimulus have so much contributed to their enrichment. Moreover, not only is our sixth contributor, Daniel Dennett, well known to all the rest of us through his writings on our common topics; to a number of us he is known through personal encounter as well. In short, this book has grown out of a whole series of discussions between a number of people of very different backgrounds and experience but with common and overlapping concerns, and in particular the common conviction that none of those concerns has any sensible likelihood of finding satisfactory pursuit other than in such cross-disciplinary co-operation and debate. It goes without saying that the end of this book is in no way the end of our discussions. It is rather, we hope, the occasion for others to join in.

The discussions that form the background to this book have, then, been going on for what is by now a long time. For a number of the present contributors they had their origins in our several reactions to Charles Taylor’s The Explanation of Behaviour (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). The earlier seminars led to publication in various forms, including the Analysis debates in 1967 between Noble and Taylor, the Aristotelian Society symposium of 1971 on ‘Final Causes’ between Timothy Sprigge and Montefiore and parts of Anthony Kenny’s The Five Ways (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). The present book, though clearly influenced by those earlier debates, takes a largely new look at the issues, being more directly based on a renewed set of seminars (and some intensive related discussions) held in Oxford over the last three or four years.

These seminars provided an extended opportunity in which to try out ideas in a context of critical discussion. However, it did not seem sensible to try to recreate in this book the atmosphere of the seminars themselves by way of some sort of reconstructed transcript — even supposing that we might have been able to present a plausible reconstruction. We decided, therefore, to start more or less from the point that the seminars had reached. Each author was asked to write an opening chapter presenting the position that he took himself to have reached at that stage and the problems with which he was most immediately preoccupied. Once these chapters had been circulated and discussed in draft form, second chapters were written in which each had an opportunity to react to what had been produced by the others or to elaborate further on any points of his or her own which he or she wished to develop. Those draft first chapters have here been modified only to the extent of seeking to eliminate sources of distraction or unfruitful misunderstanding and to improve their presentation. In general, even though some of us may subsequently have been led to modify or even to retract some of our first chapter views or formulations, they have nevertheless been allowed to stand here in the interest of preserving the onward movement of debate. For, as will be evident enough, much of what has been written in the second chapters takes the form that it does as direct response to what had been written in the first.

What of the order in which the different contributions have been placed? It would be a mistake to attribute too much importance to it. None of us set out to write either his or her first or second contribution with any particular order already in mind, and the order on which we have finally settled was established entirely ex post facto in primary response to the evident necessity of having some order or another. Nevertheless, we do see real significance in our decision to place David McFarland’s opening statement first, because, as a strikingly bold and articulate expression of a set of views that, in some largely unexpressed form or another, are probably taken for granted by a wide variety of working scientists, it represents a standpoint that did in fact serve as a main organising or focusing principle for many of our more recent discussions, and that still so serves in many of the discussions that are to be found in this book. Alan Montefiore’s opening statement comes second because it represents, on many of the central issues at any rate, a diametrically opposed view. From there on we have simply continued by way of an alternation between scientists and philosophers that conveys very fairly the thoroughly interdisciplinary nature of our debates.

The same broad considerations apply to the ordering of the second round contributions. Its inevitable overall linearity may be somewhat misleading, however, in as much as these second round contributions are not simply and straightforwardly responses to the whole set of opening statements, but, in the case of those participants resident in Oxford at any rate, reflect also the fact that discussion among them has naturally proceeded as they have continued to work on these matters. Indeed, the best way to read these second round contributions is as both the record and the continuation of a multilateral debate, with all the internal crosscurrents that any such discussions are bound to generate. If anyone should ask why any particular second round contribution takes up the particular issues that it does, while failing to take up others which, no doubt, it might equally well have taken up, the answer is again to be found in the nature of discussion itself; one inevitably tends to respond to what seems most immediately pertinent or challenging in the light of one’s own immediate preoccupations. (It may also be, of course, that points are sometimes not taken up because the author concerned — wrongly perhaps — takes his agreement with them for granted, and for granted also that, in the light of his general position, his agreement must here be transparent to all.) All of us — indeed, this has been one of our main editorial troubles — keep on having further thoughts on old thoughts, or thinking of new things to say in further reaction to what has been said by one or another of our fellows. But this too is of the nature of an on-going discussion; there would be little point in inviting others to join in if one did not know it to be essentially incomplete.

Our final section differs from the first two in that it consists of one third round contribution alone. The reason for this is not — it need hardly be said — that David McFarland is the only one among us to feel the urge to return to the argument, to take up the points that have been urged against him and, in so doing, to carry forward the working out of his own position. But just as we have placed his first contribution first in recognition of the pivotal role which his (as some of us have thought, rather extreme) views have played in the development of the rest of our discussions, so it has seemed appropriate to ask him to conclude the volume with what is, very clearly, not a summing-up sort of conclusion, but rather the opening thrust of the next round of debate. For, to repeat, the topics of this debate are urgent, the discussion remains very much open and if there are here no third round contributions from the other five participants concerned, that is certainly not because they would have nothing to say in further reply.

While the results of all this, and in particular, of course, the opening statements as they here stand, reflect many of the seminar discussions, they also differ from them in certain quite substantial ways. These differences lie primarily in the fact that by the time that the contributors got down to preparing their opening statements many of the arguments that they had earlier been pursuing in the seminars themselves had virtually disappeared. These were arguments that those concerned felt to have been settled, or to have been shown to be of no substantial importance. Nevertheless, the issues in question include some on which it is important to comment here in order to help the reader pick up the threads at the point at which the published debate takes off.

A major issue of the earlier seminars, and one that remains on the surface of even much later debate, was whether the choice between teleological and non-teleological forms of explanation for the occurrence of behaviour that might in principle be specified in descriptively neutral terms, could be decided on straightforwardly empirical grounds. This question figured very largely in the debate on Taylor’s The Explanation of Behaviour, and echoes of that debate are still to be found in Noble’s opening chapter (chapter 6). It no longer, however, figures as a key issue; for there now seems to be common agreement that the distinction between the conceptual and the empirical cannot usefully or plausibly be made hard and fast in any general or overall way. Thus, in trying to develop criteria for the identification and characterisation of goal-directive behaviour, and in analysing the peculiar nature of intentional behaviour in particular, the empirical-conceptual dichotomy no longer seems to be of central importance. Still, it would be unwise to conclude from this that the earlier debate had been irrelevant. On the contrary, we have arrived at the positions that we now (however transitionally) occupy in part by virtue of having sought to work that discussion through, and of having thus been brought to believe that the question that it may always be relevant to push at appropriate moments is not so much ‘Is this an empirical or a conceptual matter?’ as ‘Should this matter be treated in this context as depending on primarily empirical or conceptual considerations?’.

We are, hopefully, all of us much more aware than we may have been to start off with of the ways in which the uncertain delicacy of this interplay between the ‘conceptual’ and the ‘empirical’ is bound to render any working distinction between them always provisional and, in the last resort, not fully determinable. It follows from this that the ways in which we order our concepts is bound to impinge on what we may take to be the outcome of observation and experiment when we come to test our theories against the ‘reality’ that we are trying to identify, to understand and to explain. It may also follow that philosophers, as they work primarily on their analyses of concepts, and scientists, as they work primarily on their investigations of ‘reality’, have more regular and thoroughgoing need of each other’s participation than present institutional habits and arrangements can easily provide for.

A second and not altogether unrelated issue that featured frequently in our earlier discussions turned around questions concerning the classification of different forms of behaviour. Is it in principle possible to draw lines between goal-directive and non-goal-directive, or more specifically intentional and non-intentional, behaviour so workably clear-cut as to enable one to say, on the basis of the most detailed observation, of any given piece of behaviour that it fell fairly and squarely into either the one class or the other? If there is in principle any way of so classifying behaviour as to achieve this result, we certainly did not find it. Perhaps it is too early for such a venture to succeed; maybe we need much more ‘hard’ scientific information before the basis of any such classification could be constructed. But it may also be that intentionality does not reside in particular strictly observable forms of behaviour at all, in particular kinds of feed-back loops or in certain characteristic sets of equations. At all events, even if problems of classification have not altogether disappeared, we now find ourselves much more inclined to ask not so much ‘What precise forms of behaviour, if any, are intentional?’ as ‘Why are we led to make use of such intentional concepts as we do, and do we really need them for the satisfactory characterisation and explanation of certain human and perhaps other animal forms of behaviour?’

There is a third cluster of problems about which it is harder for us to be sure whether or to what extent they may have survived as a source of potential confusion for ourselves and our readers. Every specialist professional group — psychologists, physiologists, philosophers or whatever — are bound over the course of time to develop their own special vocabularies, their own bodies of authoritative texts, to which compressed reference can easily or even ‘must’ be made, their own technical procedures, their own peculiar use of otherwise quite common words. (Not to mention the fact that only too often members of one and the same family of specialists may use the same words in significantly different ways, the differences being rooted, as often as not, not merely in careless discrepancies of surface usage but in deep underlying differences of theoretical analysis and understanding.)

Inevitably, quite a large part of the seminar discussions between partners coming from such different disciplines was devoted simply to explaining ourselves to each other. In writing our first chapters for this book we have tried to disentangle ourselves from avoidable misunderstandings between ourselves, while yet making use of that earlier experience to enable newly participant readers to avoid falling into similar misunderstandings. How far we may have been successful in achieving this aim is for us hard to tell. On the one hand, we may have gone so far in taking for granted the elimination of sources of earlier misunderstanding as to leave them in effect as unmarked booby traps for the unwarned reader, relatively unfamiliar as he or she is almost bound to be with at least one or other set of our originally disparate assumptions. On the other hand, we may, almost certainly and despite all our previous efforts, ourselves have persisted in certain mutual misunderstandings. Some of these, indeed, actually emerge on the explicit surface of our second chapters; others, no doubt, remain for the reader to detect, if he or she can.

Part of these difficulties lies in a phenomenon of which we have become increasingly aware as we have gone along. We have already noted the impossibility in principle of establishing any hard and fast overall boundary between the empirical and the conceptual. But this difficulty is not wholly independent of one that we have noticed in trying to keep track of our own mutual disagreements and in determining the extent to which they may be ‘merely’ terminological or, on the other hand, substantial. In so doing we have become aware of a tendency, perhaps more natural to scientists than to philosophers, to soften the threatening outlines of looming substantial disagreement by way of an implicit mutual agreement to treat it as one of merely discrepant terminology. We would urge our readers to be similarly aware of this temptation and of this problem.

If this is a temptation that comes naturally to scientists, it may be because of the common and understandable assumption that the natural sciences are to be thought of as together contributing to one internally coherent account of the universe as a whole, and that if, therefore, two scientists actually disagree on a matter of substance, one of them must be wrong. Not all philosophers would feel themselves so sustained or constrained by any comparable view of the ‘objectivity’ of their branch of learning. Be this as it may, readers of this book should be warned that they must not take it too easily for granted that all of the contributors have always succeeded in using the same terms in the same consistent way as each other, even when they appear to be most directly in mutual agreement or at mutual loggerheads. Indeed, the interplay between fact and terminology is one of the most fascinating and tricky aspects of this whole area of debate.

We have already noted that in the course of the discussions to be found gathered together in this volume we have had, scientists and philosophers alike, both to spell out certain things that we should not normally feel the need to spell out at such a level of debate with ‘mere’ fellow professionals, and yet also at times to limit ourselves to highly abbreviated and virtually unargued statements of our own particular views on what are in fact complex and controversial matters. We have also had to leave more or less unmentioned whole bodies of debate on topics closely interconnected with those at the heart of our present concerns, but which for one reason or another have not come to the forefront in our discussions. So far as the primarily philosophical literature is concerned, one may think, for example, of the debate surrounding the mind-brain identity thesis, of the discussions concerning the a...