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Intentions and Intentional States How should we proceed? I have been talking about the Intention View, but, of course, everything I’ve been saying will apply to any Intentional View. So let me restate our problem in full generality exposing as many of our assumptions as possible. (p.42) The claim is that the following five propositions form an inconsistent set. 1. 1. Rule-following is possible. 2. 2. Following a rule consists in acting on one’s acceptance (or internalization) of a rule. 3. 3. Accepting a rule consists in an intentional state with general (prescriptive or normative) content. 4. 4. Acting under particular circumstances on an intentional state with general (prescriptive or normative) content involves some sort of inference to what the content calls for under the circumstances. 5. 5. Inference involves following a rule. If my argument is correct, then one of these claims has to go.21 The question is which one. Giving up (1) would give us rule-following skepticism. (2) seems to be the minimal content of saying that someone is following a rule. (3) is the Intentional View. (4) seems virtually platitudinous. (How could a general conditional content of the form ‘Whenever C, do A’ serve as your reason for doing A, unless you inferred that doing A was called for from the belief that the circumstances are C?) (5) seems analytic of the very idea of deductive inference (more on this below). When we review our options, the only plausible non-skeptical option would appear to be to give up (3), the Intentional View. To rescue the possibility of rule-following, it seems, we must find a way of understanding the notion of accepting or internalizing a rule that does not consist in our having some intentional state in which that rule’s requirements are explicitly represented. Wittgenstein can be read as having arrived at the same conclusion. The full passage from Investigations 219 reads as follows: “All the steps are really already taken,” means: I no longer have any choice. The rule once stamped with a particular meaning, traces the lines along which it is to be followed through the whole of space. But if something of this sort really were the case, how would it help? No; my description only made if it was understood symbolically.—I should have said: This is how it strikes me. When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly. The drift of the considerations I have been presenting seems to capture the intended point behind this passage. (p.43) Even without assuming Naturalism as an a priori constraint on the acceptability of a solution to the rule-following problem, and without assuming that mental content itself must be engendered by rule-following, it would seem that we have shown that, in its most fundamental incarnation, rule acceptance cannot consist in the formation of a propositional attitude in which the requirements of the rule are explicitly encoded. Such a picture would be one according to which rule-following is always fully sighted, always fully informed by some recognition of the requirements of the rule being followed. And the point that Wittgenstein seems to be making is that, in its most fundamental incarnation, not all rule-following can be like that—some rule-following must simply be blind. The argument I have presented supports this conclusion. 8. Rule-Following without Intentionality: Dispositions The question is how rule-following could be blind. How can someone commit himself to a certain pattern in his thought or behavior, which can then rationalize what he does, without this consisting in the formation of some appropriate kind of intentional state? The only option that seems to be available to us is the one that Kripke considers at length, that we should somehow succeed in understanding what it is for someone to accept a given rule just by invoking his or her dispositions to conform to the rule. If we were able to do that, we could explain how it is possible to act on a rule without inference because the relation between a disposition and its exercise is, of course, non-inferential. Now, Kripke, as we all know, gives an extended critique of the dispositional view. However, that critique is not generally thought to be very effective; many writers have rejected it.22 So perhaps there is hope for rule-following after all along the lines of a dispositional understanding. My own view, by contrast, is that Kripke’s critique is extremely effective, although even I underestimated the force of what I now take to be its most telling strand. And so I think that it can’t offer us any refuge, if we abandon the Intentional View. The core idea of a dispositional account is that what it is for me to accept the rule Modus Ponens is, roughly, for me to be disposed, for any p and q, upon believing both p and ‘if p, then q,’ to conclude q. Kripke pointed out that any such dispositional view runs into two problems. First, a person’s dispositions to apply a rule are bound to contain performance errors; so one can’t simply read off his dispositions which rule is at work. Second, the rule Modus Ponens, for example, is defined over an infinite number of pairs of propositions. For any p and q, p and ‘if p, then q,’ entail q. However, a person’s dispositions are finite: it is not true that I have a disposition to answer q when asked (p.44) what follows from any two propositions of the form p and ‘if p, then q,’ no matter how large. To get around these problems, the dispositionalist would have to specify ideal conditions under which (a) I would not be capable of any performance errors and (b) I would in fact be disposed to infer q from any two propositions of the form p and ‘if p, then q.’ But it is very hard to see that there are conditions under which I would be metaphysically incapable of performance errors. And whatever one thinks about that, it’s certainly very hard to see that there are ideal conditions under which I would in fact be disposed to infer q from any two propositions of the form p and ‘if p, then q’ no matter how long or complex. As Kripke says, for most propositions, it would be more correct to say that my disposition is to die before I am even able to grasp which propositions are at issue. Along with many other commentators, I used to underestimate the force of this point. The following response to it seemed compelling. A glass can have infinitary dispositions. Thus, a glass can be disposed to break when struck here, or when struck there; when struck at this angle or at that one, when struck at this location, or at that one. And so on. But if a mere glass can have infinitary dispositions, why couldn’t a human being?23 There is an important difference between the two cases. In the case of the glass, the existence of the infinite number of inputs—the different places, angles, and locations—just follows from the nature of the glass qua physical object. No idealization is required. But a capacity to grasp infinitely long propositions—the inputs in the rule-following case—does not follow from our nature as thinking beings, and certainly not from our nature as physical beings. In fact, it seems pretty clear that we do not have that capacity and could not have it, no matter how liberally we apply the notion of idealization. These, then, are Kripke’s central arguments against a dispositional account of rule-following, and although it would take much more elaboration to completely nail these arguments down, I believe that such an elaboration can be given. But both before and after he gives those arguments, Kripke several times suggests that the whole exercise is pointless, that it should simply be obvious that the dispositional account is no good. Thus, he says: To a good extent this [dispositional] reply ought to appear to be misdirected, off target. For the skeptic created an air of puzzlement as to my justification for responding ‘125’ rather than ‘5’ to the addition problem…he thinks my response is no better than a stab in the dark. Does the suggested reply advance matters? How does it justify my choice of ‘125’? What it says is “‘125’ is the response you are disposed to give…” Well and good, I know that ‘125’ is the response I am (p.45) disposed to give (I am actually giving it!)…How does any of this indicate that…‘125’ was an answer justified in terms of instructions I gave myself, rather than a mere jack-in-the-box unjustified response? This passage can seem puzzling and unconvincing when it is read, as Kripke seems to have intended it, as directed against dispositional accounts of mental content. After all, one of the most influential views of mental content nowadays is that expressions of mentalese get their meaning by virtue of their having a certain causal role in reasoning. Could it really be that this view is so obviously false that it’s not worth discussing, as Kripke suggests? And is it really plausible that the facts by virtue of which my mentalese symbol ‘+’ means what it does have to justify me when I use it one way rather than another? But if we see the passage as directed not at dispositional accounts of mental content but rather at dispositional accounts of personal-level rule-following, and if we substitute “rationalize” for “justify,” then its points seem correct. It should be puzzling that anyone was inclined to take a dispositional account of rule-following seriously. We can see why in two stages (this is a different argument than the one Kripke gives). First, and as I have been emphasizing, if I am following the rule Modus Ponens, then my following that rule explains and rationalizes my concluding q from p and ‘if p, then q,’ (just as it would be true that, if I were following the rule of Affirming the Consequent, then my following that rule would explain and rationalize my inferring q from p and ‘if q, then p’). Second, if I am following the rule Modus Ponens, then not only is my actually inferring q explained and rationalized by my accepting that rule, but so, too, is my being disposed to infer q. Suppose I consider a particular MP inference, find myself disposed to draw the conclusion, but, for whatever reason, fail to do so. That disposition to draw the conclusion would itself be explained and rationalized by my acceptance of the MP rule. However, it is, I take it, independently plausible that something can neither be explained by itself, nor rationalized by itself. So, following rule R and being disposed to conform to it cannot be the same thing. Here we see, once again, how Kripke’s Meaning Assumption gets in the way of his argument: a good point about rule-following comes out looking false when it is extended to mental content. 9. Is Going Subpersonal the Solution? It might be thought a crucial assumption of the preceding argument is that all rule-following is personal-level rule-following and that its moral, therefore, should be that at least some rule-following is subpersonal. In particular, would our problem about rule-following disappear if we construed the inferences that mediate between intentions and actions in some subpersonal way? (p.46) This suggestion resonates with a number of discussions of the Intentional View that may be found in the literature. These discussions tend to accuse the Intentional View of being ‘overly intellectualized’ and recommend substituting a subpersonal notion in its place.24 It isn’t very often made clear exactly what that is supposed to amount to. The preceding discussion should help us see that this is not a particularly useful suggestion. In the present context, going subpersonal presumably means identifying rule acceptance or internalization not with some person-level state, such as an intention, but with some subpersonal state. Such a state will either be an intentional state or some non-intentional state. Let us say that it is some intentional state in which the rule’s requirements are explicitly represented. Then, once again, it would appear that some inference (now, subpersonal) will be required to figure out what the rule calls for under the circumstances. And at this point the regress problem will recur. (That is what I meant by saying earlier that the structure of the regress problem seems to be indifferent as to whether the states of rule acceptance are personal or subpersonal.) On the other hand, we could try identifying rule internalization with some non-intentional state. Indeed, even if the state of rule internalization is initially identified with a subpersonal intentional state, it will ultimately, I take it, have to be identified with some sort of non-intentional state. But then what we would have on our hands would be some version or other of a dispositional view (with the dispositions now understood subpersonally). And although we would no longer face the rationalization problem—because subpersonal mechanisms are not called upon to rationalize their outputs—we would still face the enormous problems posed by the error and finitude objections. In consequence, I don’t believe that going subpersonal offers any sort of panacea for our problems. 10. Conclusion In my 1989 paper, “The Rule-Following Considerations,” I was concerned to explicate and assess Kripke’s arguments for his rule-following skepticism. However, since at that time something like Wright’s Intention View about rule-following struck me as correct, I thought that the interesting issues had to center on the notion of mental content rather than on rule-following in particular. Rulefollowing, like any other intentional process, I thought, came along for the ride. Viewed in that light, Kripke’s arguments were most effectively seen as arguments against various attempts to naturalize intentional content. And I believed then, and continue to believe now, that his arguments are very effective against that particular target. (p.47) The upshot, however, was that the so-called “rule-following considerations” had very little to do with rule-following per se and a great deal to do with meaning and content—as I noted at the time. I now believe that this was a mistake, induced by the illusory plausibility of the Intention View. In its most fundamental incarnation, rule acceptance cannot consist in an intentional state. For if it did, rulefollowing would have to be inference; and we know that, whatever else it may be, it cannot be that. In its most fundamental incarnation, rule-following is something that must be done blindly, without the benefit of some intentional encoding of the rule’s requirements. The question is whether that is so much as possible. The only way to make sense of it, it would seem, is if rule acceptance could be understood dispositionally. But there seem to be powerful objections to any such understanding. As a result, it is hard to explain how rule-following is so much as possible, and this difficulty arises even without our having to assume (in the way that Kripke effectively does) that intentional states need to be given a naturalistic reduction. What are we to do? Perhaps we should embrace rule-skepticism, denying that our reasoning is under the influence of general rules? The trouble is that this seems not only false about reasoning in general, but also unintelligible in connection with deductive inference. It is of the essence of deductive inference that the reasons I have for moving from certain premises to certain conclusions are general ones. So what we are contemplating, when we contemplate giving up on the Rulish picture of deductive inference, is not so much giving up on a Rulish construal of deductive inference as giving up on deductive inference itself. But that is surely not stable a resting point—didn’t we arrive at the present conclusion through the application of several instances of deductive inference? Hence we have what I have somewhat grandly called an “antinomy of pure reason”: we both must— and cannot—make sense of the notion of someone’s following a rule.The only non-skeptical option that seems open to us is to try taking the notion of following—or applying—a rule as primitive, effectively a rejection of proposition (4) above. Notice that this goes well beyond the sort of anti-reductionist response to Kripke’s arguments that I was already inclined to favor—an anti-reductionism about mental content. It would involve a primitivism about rule-following or rule-application itself: we would have to take as primitive a general (often conditional) content serving as the reason for which one believes something, without this being mediated by inference of any kind. It is not obvious that we can make sense of this, but the matter clearly deserves greater consideration.