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1 The Limits of Spectatorial Folk Psychology It is a datum that psychologically normal, adult humans often act for reasons. Equally, they often make sense of intentional actions by seeking the reasons motivating such performances.1 I took off to London for a break because I was at my wit’s end. She canceled her trip because she no longer loved him. The giving and receiving of reasons is a prominent and distinctive aspect of much familiar social commerce. The context in which we do this, the form this takes, and how we come by this ability are the central topics of this book. In speaking of “reasons” I mean what philosophers have traditionally understood to be the products of discrete episodes of means-end practical reasoning—that is, intentions to act. These constitute what might be called a person’s “motivating” reasons.2 When speaking of reasons in this sense philosophers typically focus on beliefs and desires (sometimes exclusively) and their special properties, the former being cognitive attitudes that aim at truly representing how things stand with the world and the latter being motivational attitudes that specify goals for action. When appropriately united these are held responsible for the formation of intentions. When conjoined in the right way, in virtue of their contents, beliefs and desires are minimally what is required in order to motivate us to act for a reason. In the right combination these attitudes are the essential components of reasons—and they can be appropriately tied together because they are not just psychological attitudes; they are propositional attitudes. As such, they exhibit a special kind of intentionality—a directness or aboutness toward possible situations. In having such attitudes we are psychologically related in special ways to propositional contents: “X believes that P” and “X desires that Q,” where P and Q are propositions with intelligible semantic content, such as “The boys get home at 4:00 p.m.,” “Ashridge is a fine place for a picnic,” “There are only forty pounds left in my current account,” and so forth. One can adopt beliefs and desires about any of these situations (and other propositional attitudes, too, such as fear, hope, and so on). It is debatable whether desires must always take a propositional complement; some hold that we can have desires for intentional objects— such as desiring a Ming vase or our neighbor’s singing ability—and not just situations. But with respect to beliefs—which aim at truths—this is not an option. One can only believe propositions, not objects. We need not decide if it is possible that the intentional objects of desires can be nonpropositional. It is enough to note that when desires are partnered with beliefs (thus constituting reasons), the content of such desires must be of a kind that permits them to enter into appropriate logical relations with the content of believed propositions. This requires that they have appropriate logical form and content. Without this the attitudes would not be able to bind together to form reasons, for this requires that their constitutive contents overlap at significant points—that is, they must be linked in virtue of having certain contentful components in common. But is it always true that if an action is executed for a reason then it must be possible to explicate it, minimally, by appeal to a particular belief/desire pairing? This thought is deeply rooted and seldom challenged in Anglophone philosophy of action.3 Some, however, argue that insisting on the rule that there can be no reason for acting without motivating beliefs and desires fails to accommodate our ordinary understanding of what it is to act for a reason, which includes a much wider class of psychological motivations (see Goldie 2007; Ratcliffe 2007a, 2007b). For example, we often explain action by appeal to other kinds of relevant propositional attitudes (hopes, fears, and so on) and other more basic kinds of psychological attitudes, such as perceptions and emotions. And we do this in more or less refined ways. More than this, to fully come to terms with the reason why someone acted, we frequently need to know about the person’s character , situation, and history—in short, we need to know the unique details of his or her “story.” This is true and important, and I will have more to say about all of this in the next chapter, but it should not obscure the fact that at least some of our actions are performed for...

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