We experience ourselves as agents, performing goal-directed actions in the world. This can be a short-term goal of a motor action like grasping a glass of water, or long-term goal, like the plan to call someone later on. One crucial point in both cases is that we know what we do or want to do. We are aware of our goals before and during acting. This awareness constitutes a conscious intention to act. Even further, we seem to control our actions — at least most of the time — through our intentions. We also have a sense of agency for our actions, which is an immediate feeling of control and authorship (Gallagher 2005). Common sense teaches us that consciousness of our intentions seems to be of unquestionable relevance for our everyday acting.
This experience raises two kinds of questions: Why do we experience our intentions as conscious? What is the function of the phenomenal experience of conscious intentions and how do intentions exert their role in our acting? These questions address the problem of conscious intentions at two levels. One is about identifying the function and benefits of conscious intentions for our human nature — it is about a myth. The other seems to be above that about understanding, having to do with how the conscious intention exerts its function. It is an attempt to find a scientific, mechanistic explanation about the function of conscious intentions in not only analytical, but also empirical terms (see also Anderson this collection, and Craver this collection).
Table 1: Overview over the different approaches to the explanation of the function of conscious intentions
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Conscious intentions “provide us with a special kind of self-knowledge” (Pacherie this collection, p. 5) |
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Conscious intentions “[turn us into] temporally extended agents” (Pacherie this collection, p. 3) |
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Conscious intentions are a “by-product of some more general endowments of human nature” (Pacherie this collection, p. 6) |
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conscious intentions “[..are] not just representations of goals but also […] a specific set of monitoring and control processes, organizing and structuring motor processes that themselves generate movements” (Pacherie this collection, p. 10) |
In her target article, ConsciousIntentions: Thesocialcreationmyth, Elizabeth Pacherie wants to elucidate the function of conscious intentions and reviews teleological approaches on the role of conscious intentions offered by Velleman, as well as his interpretations of Bratman and Anscombe. In addition, she addresses above-mentioned question about the “how” of the causal role of intentions. Based on her hierarchical concept of individual motor actions and scientific data about joint action, Pacherie develops her own approach to the function of conscious intentions. Her idea is supported by the consideration of the potentially striking role of conscious intentions in joint actions (inter-individual actions) regarded as one of the major achievements of the human species. Pacherie’s idea is that conscious intentions have the function of controlling motor action and to intra- and inter-individually align our actions with each other.
Answering the initial question of whether we need a creation myth or not, I would like to answer: no, we do not need a myth. We need, as Pacherie tries to give in her target paper, an explanation. What I perhaps like best about the paper is her focus on the role of conscious intentions in action, while the other creation myths described in her paper only consider a more abstract level. We experience the function of conscious intentions strongly and immediately in individual and joint action. Understanding the function of conscious intentions in this context might therefore be one of the most difficult but promising approaches, as it is so essential for human existence. Her social creation myth has the aim to find an explanation of the function and potential causal role of conscious intentions. The importance of this approach, to my mind, is strengthened by Pacherie’s attempt to combine empirical data and analytical considerations about motor action and motor control.
In what follows, the teleological and social creation myths are first summarized. Postulating that Pacherie’s social creation myth is more than a myth, it should nevertheless fit the current philosophical conceptions and empirical knowledge about the nature of conscious intentions and their causal function. I therefore analyse it according to contemporary approaches in philosophy of mind and I incorporate knowledge of experimental approaches. I argue that according to these approaches, there might arise some difficulties concerning the causal function of conscious intentions in individual and joint action, postulated in Pacherie’s social creation myth. Discussing a potential solution, how to understand the “causal” role of conscious intentions in the social creation myth despite those limitations, this commentary could serve as a complementary approach to the social creation myth of Pacherie. I want to argue that a creation myth cannot answer the relevant question, how conscious intentions play a role in our acting, without considering the nature of conscious intentions and thereby simultaneously focusing on their causal role.