Abstract
This paper analyzes three contrasting strategies for modeling intentional agency in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and action, and draws parallels between them and similar strategies of scientific model-construction. Gricean modeling involves identifying primitive building blocks of intentional agency, and building up from such building blocks to prototypically agential behaviors. Analogical modeling is based on picking out an exemplary type of intentional agency, which is used as a model for other agential types. Theoretical modeling involves reasoning about intentional agency in terms of some domain-general framework of lawlike regularities, which involves no detailed reference to particular building blocks or exemplars of intentional agency (although it may involve coarse-grained or heuristic reference to some of them). Given the contrasting procedural approaches that they employ and the different types of knowledge that they embody, the three strategies are argued to provide mutually complementary perspectives on intentional agency.
Highlights
This paper distinguishes three contrasting methodological strategies for modeling intentional agency in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and action.1 The three strategies have all been used previously, and I will provide examples of each of them from the literature
They have been understood as common manifestations of a more or less univocal philosophical practice of conceptual analysis (Jackson, 1998; King, 2016). By contrast to this traditional approach, I will argue that much like the theoretical modeling of other complex phenomena in science, such as climate change (Lenhard & Winsberg, 2010; Parker, 2006) or disease epidemics (e.g. Kermack & McKendrick, 1927; Shiller, 2017) may benefit from the use of multiple complementary modeling strategies, philosophers can make use of several different methodological strategies for modeling intentional agency.2. These strategies may serve different theoretical goals to varying degrees of satisfaction, they may be more or less amenable to different types of targets, and they may complement one another in our overall effort to come to terms with intentional agency
With these caveats in mind, I am confident that the methodological framework that I will articulate is sufficiently comprehensive to support an important kind of methodological pluralism in the philosophy of mind and action
Summary
This paper distinguishes three contrasting methodological strategies for modeling intentional agency in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and action. The three strategies have all been used previously, and I will provide examples of each of them from the literature. I will leave for another occasion discussion of model-based interdisciplinary exchanges (GrüneYanoff & Mäki, 2014) between philosophy and other disciplines, which are concerned with intentional action and agency, such as decision theory (Binmore, 2009; Gintis, 2009; Hausman, 2012) and social and developmental psychology (Carpenter & Svetlova, 2017; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Rakoczy, 2017; Tomasello, 2019) With these caveats in mind, I am confident that the methodological framework that I will articulate is sufficiently comprehensive to support an important kind of methodological pluralism in the philosophy of mind and action. At the end of the paper, I draw together my conclusions, and indicate how they support a pragmatic and pluralistic approach to the philosophy of mind and action
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