Abstract
Can an agent deliberating about an action A hold a meaningful credence that she will do A? ‘No’, say some authors, for ‘deliberation crowds out prediction’ (DCOP). Others disagree, but we argue here that such disagreements are often terminological. We explain why DCOP holds in a Ramseyian operationalist model of credence, but show that it is trivial to extend this model so that DCOP fails. We then discuss a model due to Joyce, and show that Joyce’s rejection of DCOP rests on terminological choices about terms such as ‘intention’, ‘prediction’, and ‘belief’. Once these choices are in view, they reveal underlying agreement between Joyce and the DCOP-favouring tradition that descends from Ramsey. Joyce’s Evidential Autonomy Thesis is effectively DCOP, in different terminological clothing. Both principles rest on the so-called ‘transparency’ of first-person present-tensed reflection on one’s own mental states.
Highlights
Can an agent hold a meaningful credence about a contemplated action, as she deliberates? Can she believe that it is, say, 70% probable that she will do A, while she chooses whether to do A? Following Spohn (1977) and Levi (1989, 1996), some writers claim that such ‘act credences’ are problematic, or even incoherent—deliberation crowds out prediction (DCOP), as Levi puts it
4.1 Joyce on the role of act credences. Characterising his own version of Causal Decision Theory (CDT), Joyce notes that it “requires deliberating agents to make predictions about their own actions.” (Joyce 2002, 69) He notes that Levi maintains that such a decision theory is “incoherent because ‘deliberation crowds out prediction.’” In response, Joyce defends the following conclusion:
(It is not clear that the absurdity Joyce has in mind is precisely the one we identified in §3—arguably, it can’t be, for Joyce takes it to obtain even in his non-Ramseyian models
Summary
Can an agent hold a meaningful credence about a contemplated action, as she deliberates? Can she believe that it is, say, 70% probable that she will do A, while she chooses whether to do A? Following Spohn (1977) and Levi (1989, 1996), some writers claim that such ‘act credences’ are problematic, or even incoherent—deliberation crowds out prediction (DCOP), as Levi puts it. (Joyce agrees with Ramsey that there are no act credences in Ramsey’s sense during deliberation.) Joyce’s disagreement with Levi has the same terminological character. We don’t deny that there is room for argument about the terminological matter in question (i.e., whether to treat intentions as a special kind of belief) Disagreement about this matter should not be allowed to obscure a deeper point of agreement between the two models. This point of agreement is what Joyce terms the Evidential Autonomy Thesis (EAT): “[A] rational agent, while in the midst of her deliberations, is in a position to legitimately ignore any evidence she might possess about what she is likely to do,” (2007, 556–557) as Joyce puts it. Is Joyce’s disagreement with DCOP much shallower than he and others have assumed, but there is wide agreement on a fundamental and closely-related feature of agency—a feature already on the table in Ramsey, and well articulated in Moran’s work on transparency
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