Peter Carruthers's "Explaining our Actions"

Peter Carruthers is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. His publications include Human and Animal Minds (2019) and Human Motives: Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect (2024).

Carruthers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing, and shared the following:

While I hope that page 99 of my book might provide some indication of the book’s quality, it will give very little idea what it is about. For while the book as a whole catalogs how a great deal of our common-sense psychology and the philosophical theorizing that relies on it is mistaken, page 99 is part of a discussion of one of the things that common-sense gets right. This is that there is a separate category of intentions and goals that are quite distinct from our desires, on the one hand, and our beliefs, on the other. Some philosophers, in contrast, have claimed that intentions just are a certain kind of desire, whereas others have claim that they are really a special sort of belief. In the latter case the claim is that both beliefs and intentions are really commitments to the truth of a proposition, where the distinctive thing about an intention is just that it is a commitment to make a proposition true rather than to it already being true. The text of page 99 is part of a longer discussion showing that these claims are meritless.

Philosophers have mostly addressed questions about the nature of the human mind by relying on some combination of common-sense beliefs, introspection, linguistic analysis, and intuitions generated from imaginary examples. The upshot is what I call the “standard model” of the mind (also known as belief-desire psychology), together with a number of less-standard variants. (The latter include the ideas that intentions can be reduced to desires or to beliefs, mentioned above; that knowledge is a basic kind of mental state, not a special sort of belief; and that there is a distinctive category of graded-strength beliefs, called “credences.”) I show that the standard model is excessively narrow in its scope, since it focuses entirely on so-called “intentional actions.” (These are actions that are selected and caused by our beliefs and desires.) Vast swathes of habitual, speeded, and skilled actions are unjustifiably neglected. Moreover, the standard philosophical account of belief elides together different kinds of mental state as if they were the same, while also including kinds that are actually a kind of intention. And the most popular philosophical account of desire gets the relationship between pleasure and desire completely back-to-front. Pleasures are not experiences we desire to have or to continue. Rather, desires are states that embed anticipatory pleasure in their contents. The overall methodological moral of the book is that standard philosophical techniques are completely bankrupt. To understand the mind we need to engage with the science. Readers of the book should end up with a good idea of the varieties of human action and their true explanations, as well as the real nature of the main categories of mental state that the mind contains.

Learn more about Explaining our Actions at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Human Motives.

--Marshal Zeringue