Deviant Acts

A classic case of deviance is Davidson’s example of the climber who wants to be rid of the weight and danger of holding his colleague on the end of a rope and believes he has only to let go to satisfy this desire – and is then made so nervous by these thoughts that he lets go.

An act. It seems like such a simple concept, but when one tries to assign causes, reasons and intents or even to locate in time and space “an act” it suddenly becomes remarkably elusive.

For example, consider Ansel Adams, describing the making of the photograph,  Merced River, Cliffs, Autumn: Yosemite National Park, 1939 in the book Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (1983):

I came across this subject in the western area of Yosemite Valley, and was immediately arrested by the image that came into my mind.

Adams previsualized as was his custom:

… I placed the average luminance on Zone V and indicated Normal-plue-one developing time (in a tray as usual).

… In retrospect, I believe I should have given this negative a little more exposure with the same Normal-plus-one development.

… During printing I dodged the dark areas in the lower left section for not more than 10 percent of the total exposure time, again any obviuos graying of the deeep shadows would be very unpleasant. A few shafts of early sun touched the leaves and the grasses of the riverbanks. The latter required some burning-in, because the sunlit yellow grass was much the brightest element of the scene.

I have not yet made a print that fully satisfies me.

Where, if ever, was the photograph made? In his previsualization? When he clicked the shutter? When he made an (unsatisfactory) print? What of the many, many times that everybody, including Adams, previsualizes and clicks the shutter only to be entirely disappointed by what turns up in the digital file or the negative? Or, conversely what of exposures that are not what one thought one was getting, but which are, nevertheless, turned into very nice prints? Where does the act of making the picture happen? Where is the reason, where the intent; what is the cause?

The first quote at the top of this post, and the first section of quotes, below, are from a review of the book, How We Act: Causes, Reasons and Intentions, by Berent Enç; reviewed by John Bishop in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

… Basic behaviour … is behaviour in which the agent exercises immediate ’know how’ in bringing about a particular type of event – and an agent’s repertoire of basic behaviour may, and typically does, change over time (consider shoe-lace tying, for example). For token basic behaviour to count as action it must be caused (in the ’right’ kind of way) by the agent’s intention to bring about an event of the relevant ’basic *result* type’. Non-basic actions are then ’generated’ from basic actions, through appropriate relations obtaining between their respective *results* – relations which include, but are not confined to, causal relations. (Thus, my voting for the motion is generated by my raising my arm at the right time in virtue of certain conventions; my interrupting my neighbour’s view of the chairman is generated by my raising my arm just because – given the physical situation – my arm’s coming to be in that position constitutes an interruption to her line of sight; and my annoying my elderly relative is generated, at a further remove, by my raising my arm because – qua voting for a motion of which my relative disapproves – it causes his chagrin.)

… According to CTA [causal theory of action], we have agency when behaviour results from the agent’s reasons for so behaving. Causal theorists therefore owe an account of what it is for a behaver’s motivational states to count as reasons, and to cause behaviour qua reasons. What is the distinction between (for example) the diving behaviour of the moth, triggered when it hears a sound of high frequency of the kind produced by the sonar mechanism of its bat predators, and behaviour that is done for reasons? Enç’s answer is that acting for reasons requires deliberation – the weighing of prospective alternative actions, and choosing amongst them. Mental causes that constitute the agent’s reasons consist in a desire for some end, Q, the recognition of circumstances C, and an instrumental belief of the form ’if under C, action A is done, Q results’. A causal pathway from these states to the action A cannot, as Enç observes, be represented as an ’&-gate’ as is possible with the moth’s ’tropistic’ response where the detection of the high-pitched sound suffices to trigger the ‘mere’ disposition: ‘if high-pitched sound detected, dive’ (see p.151). But, precisely because rational mental causes do not operate so automatically it may appear that their efficacy requires irreducible mental acts of weighing, evaluating, ordering and deciding. Enç quotes Gary Watson: ‘The distinctive libertarian thought is that I must have the power to determine which, among the alternatives I have the capacity to entertain, I shall will (undertake, try for …).’ (‘Free Action and Free Will,’ Mind 96, 1987, p.169). Enç claims to be able to show that ’ “the distinct[ive] libertarian thought” can be easily captured by a causal theory of action without resorting to concepts of willing, undertaking, or a special sense of trying …’ (p.153).

What would he think of the ducks doing game theory?

Consider now, the problem of even defining where an act takes place. This is from a different book review; this one is, Action and Its Explanation, David-Hillel Ruben; reviewed by Ausonio Marras, also in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (sorry about their lack of paragraph breaks!):

… Chapter 1 offers a version of the “prolific” theory of action individuation, counting the bending of my finger (as I pull the trigger to kill the Queen) as distinct from the action of killing the Queen, and locating the latter at the time and place of the Queen’s death – contrary to “austere” theories (like Davidson’s) that identify the two actions and locate them at the time and place of the finger bending. The consequence of this way of counting actions – that, for example, I killed the Queen at distant Balmoral, where she died, six months after I shot her in London, and (suppose) three months after I myself died – is, Ruben argues, not only no more paradoxical than the austere view’s consequence that the Queen was killed in London six months before she died in Balmoral, but its paradoxical appearance can be explained away by extending Peter Geach’s familiar distinction between real changes and mere “Cambridge” changes to actions: my bending my finger is a real action, but my killing the Queen is a Cambridge action, one that only attributes a Cambridge change to me – the sort of change that Napoleon undergoes in being eulogized by Chirac, or that Adam and Eve undergo in gaining another remote descendant. As these examples show, one need not exist at p at t in order to have or acquire a property at p at t: “posthumous predication” is not as puzzling as might seem. However, if by posthumous predication I may be credited with the delayed action of killing the Queen at a time and place when and where I am not, why can’t my original, long past action of bending my finger (or pulling the trigger, or shooting the Queen) similarly be credited with acquiring the delayed property of being a killing, as some “austere” theorists (Davidson, Bennett, etc.) have suggested? Ruben admits it could, but to allow a shooting to become a killing is to countenance a Cambridge meta-event, and thus to overpopulate our ontology to no advantage. Perhaps so; but there seems to be something unsettling about the very idea of a Cambridge action, with its suggestion that it is somehow not a “real” action (the way a Cambridge change is not a “real” change). Unlike Adam’s and Eve’s acquiring a remote descendant, or Napoleon being eulogized now – events on which Adam and Napoleon had no say – my killing of the Queen was as real an action as was my pulling the trigger with murderous intentions. Indeed, it is difficult to see why I would be held accountable for it unless the killing was intimately related to my wounding the Queen at the place and time of my shooting her – a wounding that turned out to be mortal; and that “intimate relation” surely was not a causal one, for my wounding her did not cause my killing her, though it caused her death. If the relation between the wounding (or the shooting) and the killing was not a causal one, what was it? The only remotely plausible answers would seem to be: either the relation of identity or the relation of “becoming”: the wounding was a killing, or it became a killing. But it’s hard to see how an event (or action) can become another event (or action), except in the sense that it “turned out to be” a certain way: and that just means that it (the wounding) later came to merit a new and more appropriate characterization (as a killing). In other words, the Queen’s death made it true that the wounding was a mortal one, i.e., a killing – just as the “austere” theory would have it.

To use a much abused analogy, it would seem that not only causation, intent and reason are more wave than particle, so also is the act itself (admitting the irony of using the word “itself” for something that I have just been working to define as no such thing … ).

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/