New Ideas in Psychology 28 (2010) 283–295

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newideapsych

The emergence of action

Richard CampbellThe Australian National University, Canberra

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Available online 21 October 2009

E-mail address: rcampbell@netspeed.com.au

0732-118X/$ – see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltdoi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2009.09.004

a b s t r a c t

How does the concept of action fit within a scientifically seriousworld-view? This paper argues that the category of action, with itsgoal-seeking and orientation to the future, is not a human pecu-liarity, a perplexing incongruity in an otherwise mechanisticworld. Rather, actions pervade the whole biological domain. Theconcept of action is needed to explicate the continued existence ofevery biological organism.Systems as primitive as bacteria are autonomous far-from-equi-librium systems, which maintain themselves in existence by theirinteractions with their environments. That requires recognizingthem as performing simple actions. Three criteria are proposedwhich justify identifying certain behaviour as minimal actions:goal-seeking; possibly being in error; and behaving as a functionalwhole. Adding further criteria yields richer concepts of action,namely, self-directed and reflective action. Only the last isdistinctively human.

� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

How to accommodate actions within a scientifically serious world-view has troubled many thinkers,especially over the past century or so. To describe behaviour in terms of stimulus and response soundssuitably scientific. But actions do not fit that pattern. With their goal-seeking and orientation to thefuture, actions seem puzzling anomalies in an otherwise physical world, ultimately to be explained inpurely physical termsdor else explained away. Philosophers have found them metaphysical embar-rassments, only encountered, as they scan through the biological world when they finally arrive athuman beings. In this paper I argue that the category of action, with its goal-seeking and orientation tothe future, is not a human peculiarity, a perplexing incongruity in an otherwise mechanistic world.Rather, actions pervade the whole biological domain. The concept of action is needed to explicate thestability of autonomous far-from-equilibrium systems, of which every biological system is an instance.

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1. Minimal action

As a first step, consider the fact that all biological organisms, from bacteria to humans, are complexsystems of processes in a far-from-equilibrium state. Once we think of them in that light, the greatpuzzle is that they continue to exist, instead of degenerating through entropy into disorganized sludge.

The short answer is that organisms are self-maintenant. In some respects, they are like candleflames. A candle flame can keep burning for hours on end, but only so long as fuel and oxygen continueto be drawn into the process. Cut off either, and the flame goes out; it ceases to exist. But a candle flamemakes several active contributions to its own persistence. It maintains its temperature above thecombustion threshold; it melts and then vaporizes wax into a continuing supply of fuel; and in normalatmospheric conditions, it induces convection currents, thereby sucking in the oxygen it needs andcarrying away the carbon dioxide produced by its own combustion.

Unlike candle flames, biological systems are able to maintain stability not only within certain rangesof conditions, but also within certain ranges of changes of conditions. That is, they can switch todeploying different kinds of processes depending on their detection of differing conditions in theenvironment. A relatively simple example is provided by bacteria which have the ability to regulatetheir swimming so that they move towards an attractant chemical. In the bacteria E. Coli, for example,processes along a network of proteins serve to modulate the frequency of their tumbling motion. Whenmoving up an attractant gradient, these bacteria encounter over time an increasing concentration of anattractant chemical. In response, the frequency of their tumbling decreases and thus they tend tocontinue swimming up the gradient. If they do not encounter increasing concentrations of theattractant, they keep alternating periods of tumbling and swimming until they do come across anattractant gradient. As a result, they swim towards a source of the attractant chemical.1

These two kinds of activitydswimming and tumblingdare different ways in which a bacterium actsin response to its detecting significant variations in its environmental conditions. These two ways ofacting are appropriate for it in the sense that each contributes to its self-maintenance in the differentcircumstances. The bacterium’s ability to detect attractant-gradients, and to respond by switchingbetween its two modes of behaving, means that not only is it self-maintenant, but it also therebymaintains its own ability to be self-maintenant; it is able to switch between activating one or other of itsself-maintenant processes as the environment changes. That is, by means of its own internal activity, itexhibits recursive self-maintenance. A relatively stable and cohesive organization of processes whichcontains within itself sufficient complexity to operate in ways that ensure (within limits) its ownviability and coherence is an autonomous system.2

These descriptions have two noteworthy features. One is the need to use self-reflexive locutions.The facts concerning the persistence of certain process systems in a far-from-equilibrium state requirethose locutions. It is remarkable how autonomous systems behave in ways that enable themselves topersist, Their persistence is only made possible by their being open systemsdthey necessarily engagein exchanges with their immediate environmentdand then use those inputs to repair and regeneratethemselves. Hence, any adequate description of these systems must not only advert to those exchangeswith their environmental conditions, but must do so in ways which explicate the functions thoseexchanges serve in ensuring the system’s metabolism and persistence. But to explicate that is todescribe its self-maintenance. This reflexivity is what justifies the contextual and perspectival characterof this discourse.

Secondly, in describing the self-maintenance of an organism, it is appropriate to speak of what it isdoing. Now, the invocation of the verb ‘‘to do’’ here might perhaps be interpreted as nothing more thana way of referring to objective behavioural phenomena, rather than to actions, strictly speakingdand

1 U. Alon, M.G. Surette, N. Barkai, & S. Leibler: ‘Robustness in bacterial chemotaxis’, Nature, 397, 14 January 1999, pp. 168-171.Slightly larger and more complex organisms, such as paramecia, similarly detect whether they are swimming up sugargradients, using detectors at both ends of their lozenge-shaped bodies. When the one at its ‘front’ detects a higher amount ofdissolved sugar than does the one at the ‘rear’, the paramecium keeps swimming; otherwise, it tumbles.

2 W. Christensen & C.A. Hooker, ‘Autonomy and the Emergence of Intelligence: Organised interactive construction’ inCommunication and CognitiondArtificial Intelligence, 17 (3-4), 2000.

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so might be regarded as not very significant. Indeed, there is a loose sense in which any process can besaid to be ‘doing’ something. But I submit that we have to speak about what an organism is doing isa stronger sense than that. So, the question becomes: what validity do these ways of speaking have?What justifies our referring to certain behavioural occurrences (taking that word as a neutral term forsome organism’s response to stimuli) as actions?

I propose a graduated conception of action, building up from the concept of a minimal action. Forsome occurrence of self-generated behaviour to qualify minimally as an action, it has to satisfy threecriteria. These criteria are each necessary, and jointly sufficient, to pick out the simplest and most basickind of action. There is a stronger notion of action which presupposes that, in addition to the threecriteria I am about to propose, some behavioural occurrence should only be called an ‘action’ if it isperformed by a self-directed agent. And there is an even stronger sense which requires reflectiveappraisal of potential consequences, and deliberation about which of them to pursue. Only humansperform actions in this last sense. Since these stronger senses of action build upon that of a minimalaction, I will postpone discussion of them until after I have elaborated the three basic criteria.

2. Goal-directedness

Firstly, to count as a minimal action, some behavioural occurrence has to be goal-directed. That is,the behaviour anticipates future situations, and how it unfolds is regulated accordingly. In primitiveorganisms, the goal-directedness contributes to the organism’s own recursive self-maintenance. Inthese cases, that behaviour has to be self-generated and enable its own viability and coherence. Itcannot be imposed by an external agent.

This is the crucial difference between the actions of a living organism and any machine with in-builtfeedback loops which have been designed to direct it towards some target. An example of the latter isa heat-seeking missile. There is, of course, a loose sense in which such a missile may be said to be goal-directed, in that its feedback mechanisms serve to ‘correct’ any deviations from its specified path andhave the effect of ensuring (if it is working properly and is not shot down) that it hits its target. But it isnot autonomous in the way we have seen a bacterium to be. A missile’s target is programmed by thepeople who fired it, and its ways of adjusting its future movements have been built in by its manu-facturers, not generated by itself. By contrast, even in the case of a simple bacterium, its environmentalinteractions and its internal metabolic processes are initiated by itself, and contribute essentially to itsown self-maintenance and constituting coherence. There is no way in which an inherent constitutingcoherence (a metabolism) can be defined for a missile. So, strictly speaking, the movements of a missiledo not count as genuine actionsdthey just mimic actionsdbecause they are neither minimallyanticipative, nor are the norms by which its flight is directed towards the target its own.

Now, all action involves self-projection into the future; an agent acts towards some end. That isindeed the crucial difference between an action and a mere movementda movement, or a series ofmovements, does not necessarily aim at anything. Both involve change over time, but an actioninvolves more than that. It is characteristic of an actiondany actiondthat it intrinsically involvesa telos, an objective towards which it directs its own movements. The structure of action is essentiallyteleological.3

In fact, actions are normally identified in terms of their intrinsic ends. That is, generally one action isindividuated from another not just by the movements or processes they involve, but also by the end-states the achieving of which constitutes the successful fulfilment of those actions. The identity ofa particular action is a function of the achievement which its effective performance would bring about.This is so even if some extraneous cause were to intervene to prevent some particular action fromachieving its intrinsic end. It would still be the case that what the agent was doing, albeit withoutsuccess, was directed towards that end. Failure to attain the intrinsic end, however, is not alwaysa matter of prevention; to say that would be too strong. Suppose I was walking to the bank, but on theway met some friends and fell into an extended conversation with them which lasted until past the

3 This was Aristotle’s insight, no doubt suggested by his strong interest in biology. My adoption of his terminology here doesnot mean, however, that I am trying to revive his entire metaphysical framework. That would be a serious mistake.

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bank’s closing time, with the result that I never actually arrived there that day. Despite the fact that Inever reached the bank, it nevertheless remains the case that walking to the bank is what I was doingwhen I met my friends. The goal-directedness of any piece of behaviour which counts as an action doesnot require that its objective be actually attained, nor that its not being fulfilled is necessarily a matterof its being prevented by some external force.

To understand this identification of actions in terms of their intrinsic ends we need to invokea philosophical term of art which has largely fallen out of use. There is an ‘internal relation’ between anaction and its telos, i.e. the relation to a specific telos is inherent in the action’s being the action it is.There has been little consideration given to internal relations since Bertrand Russell and G.E. Mooreattacked the very idea of internal relations when ushering in analytic philosophy in the early years ofthe 20th Century. Despite the fact that philosophers nowadays rarely consider internal relations, theycannot be so easily ignored. The arc of a circle is internally related to the centre of that circle; the arccould not be what it is without having a determinate geometric relationship to that point as its centre.Likewise, without internal relations, no sense can be made of the concept of action. The point is that anaction of any specific type is constituted and identified by its relation to a certain sort of outcome, eventhough it can fail to achieve that outcome.

That actions are necessarily goal-directed has unfortunately been widely misunderstood because ofthe pervasive tendency to attribute their goal-directedness to the human mind. Once that conceptualattribution is required, any talk of goal-seeking behaviour on the part of non-humans is easilydismissed as anthropomorphic projection. But that is perverse. The role of consciousness in humanaction is a worthy topic but it is not a prerequisite for goal-directedness simpliciter. Goal-directedness isindeed one characteristic of human mentality, but it is also manifest in primitive biological organisms,which cannot be described as self-consciously aware.

So, what justifies the ascription of goal-directedness to even such relatively simple organisms asbacteria? The answer is the contingent fact that their behaviour manifests internal regulative routinesthat serve self-maintaining functions. It is a fact of natural history that there came to exist organismswith routines which serve these functions. Presumably, how that happened has to be explained bysome account based on evolutionary selection. But that such systems did emerge, with this distinctivecharacteristic, is a fact which any plausible ontology must accommodate.

What is unmistakable is that goal-seeking, and orientation to the future, is not peculiar to humanmentality; it is not a puzzling anomaly only encountered, as one scans through the biological domainwhen one finally arrives at human beings. The way in which countless far-from-equilibrium processesmaintain themselves in existence by regulating their internal regulative processes provides thephysico-chemical and biological bases in terms of which goal-seeking can be understood. Theseregulatory processes serve that function, and presumably were selected through evolution preciselybecause they served that function effectively. Accordingly, they now have that function. That is theconceptual basis of goal-directness in primitive organisms.

3. The possibility of error

Secondly, to count as an action, some occurrence of behaviour must admit the possibility of error. Anorganism might discriminate something in its environment which leads it to initiate a procedure thathappens not to be appropriate in that environment. When it does so, it has manifestly made a mistake.This possibility is criterial; that is, some behavioural occurrence qualifies as a minimal action only if theputative action could go wrong. A behavioural occurrence which is goal-directed might neverthelessmiss its mark.

It is this possibility which entails that the concept of action is intrinsically normative. Thatnormativity is inherent in actions of any sort has not always been recognizeddperhaps because ofa common tendency, especially since the time of Hume and Kant, to understand normativity in terms ofmoral ‘‘oughts’’, deriving from the imperatives of a command or moral law. Since it is highly implausibleto believe that every possible action involves an implicit reference to moral strictures, it has been all tooeasy to overlook the rather different kind of normativity inherent in the very concept of action.

To sharpen the focus upon this latter kind of normativity, consider the action of firing an arrow ata bullseye. If the arrow hits its mark, the action is successful. Suppose, on the other hand, the arrow

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misses the centre of the target, lodging instead in one of the outer rings. That does not negate the factthat the action performed was nevertheless one of firing at the bullseye. But the act has not fulfilled itsproper telos; it failed to achieve its goal. Not just the arrow, but the act of firing it has missed its mark. Inthis case, there is a disparity between what the act was, and what it actually accomplished. Its missingthe mark is precisely the occurrence of that disparity. The bullseye which the arrow should have hitfunctions as the norm determining the error which has occurred since it is internally related to the actof firing, despite its actual result.

Another way of making clear that there is a kind of normativity here is to express the point in termsof ‘‘ought’’. Given the action, the arrow ought to have hit the bullseye, but it did not. But this ‘‘ought’’ isnot a moral requirement; it simply expresses the internal relation between hitting the bullseye and theact of firing at it. There is an asymmetry between success and failure; the identity of the action itselfputs a premium on success. The kind of normativity present in action is founded on that asymmetry. Aswe saw, that identity is conferred by the act’s telos. Accordingly, the telos serves as the norm which theact has to fulfil, if it is to be properly performed.

‘Going wrong’ like this admits of degrees; the arrow might lodge quite near the centre of the target,or in the outer rings, or it might miss the target altogether. The further away from the bullseye it lands,the worse was the action performed (and the lower the score!). Now suppose that when the archer letthe arrow go from his bow, it flew at right angles to the line between the target and himself. In this case,it becomes difficult to maintain that what he did was a case of ‘firing at the bullseye’. In this respect,action is somewhat like light radiating from a source: the further the actual result is away from theintended goal, to that extent the action itself dissipates, until eventually, instead of saying that theaction was performed extremely badly, we have to say that the archer altogether failed to perform thatact.

There is a certain kind of apparent counter-example to this second criterion of an actiond that itadmit the possibility of errordwhich is instructive. Some actions are necessarily successful, e.g.,murdering. In these cases, if the action has been performed, there is no possibility that it wasunsuccessful. If someone has murdered another, the latter is always dead (even if the corpse is yet to bediscovered). Our natural languages contain many words that are (or are cognates of) ‘achievement’verbs; that is, they have success ‘built in’. For instance, just as the telos of running a race is to win, sowinning is necessarily successful. Similarly, a birth is necessarily productive of a baby (even if it is still-born). This linguistic phenomenon is so common it would be tedious to multiply examples further. Inall these cases, the internal relation between the action and its telos has been elevated into a conceptualnecessity.

Nevertheless, so strong is the requirement that actions should admit the possibility of error thatnatural languages have devised ways of reinserting a logical gap into these cases of necessarilysuccessful action. Thereby these cases exemplify the cliche about exceptions proving the rule. Thelogical gap opened up by the possibility of error must be marked somehow. The usual way of doing thatin English is to invoke auxiliary verbs like ‘‘try’’, ‘‘attempt’’ and ‘‘intend’’; even though a murdernecessarily is productive of a death, someone can attempt to murder someone else, but fail. So, eventhough some actions, if performed at all, are performed successfully, the activity involved in carryingthem out still could go wrongdwhich in fact confirms the point.

Now, to return to a paradigm case of minimal action, bacteria which swim towards a source of sugar,the possibility of error is present even here; bacteria will also swim up a saccharine gradient. Why thatcounts as an error is that saccharine does not serve the nourishing function for the bacteria whichingesting sugar does. And organisms more sophisticated than bacteria are liable to a wider range oferrors in their actionsdprecisely because they are capable of performing a wide range of actions. Thereis nothing fanciful or metaphorical about ascribing error to these bacteria. The behavioural routineswhich serve significant functions for any species can be determined by empirical investigation, andwhether some organ or routine has a function which its exercise fails to serve in certain circumstancesis also an issue which can be determined by empirical investigation.

There are many ways in which actions might go wrong, and they are importantly different. The mostfundamental way is that the action performed might not contribute to the agent’s self-maintenance.That can come about through the action’s not serving the evolutionary function that it should. That is,the organism did not carry out some specific routine completely or adequately, perhaps through some

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malfunction. Alternatively, error can come about by an action’s failing to achieve the designated goaltowards which it was directed, not through some malfunction, but because the environmentalconditions were not right. But in more complex creatures than those primitive life-forms, where thenorms governing action are increasingly generic, and actions become increasingly self-directed ratherthan the enactment of predetermined task-routines, the link back to self-maintenance is not always sodirect. The goals humans pursue exemplify a vast array of norms. In these cases, error can also occurthrough misperception, miscalculation, confusion, infelicitous choice of means, conflicting norms,inadequate resources, and so on. In every case, however, the crucial point is that genuine actions, evenif quite minimal, are always liable to error.

4. Attributable to the system as a whole

The third criterion which some behavioural occurrence must satisfy to count as an action hasalready been implicit in my exposition thus far. It is time to make it explicit. Speaking of goal-direct-edness and the possibility of errordthe first two criteriadonly makes sense if the subject to which theaction is ascribed is the entire organism. It is the bacterium which seeks sugar, and can be deceived bya saccharine solution. And it is a frog which flicks its tongue and eats bugs, and can be tricked into alsoflicking at pebbles. This logical feature is quite general: it is characteristic of action-descriptions thatthey are attributable to an agent as a functional whole.4

In general, entities are constituted as cohesive process systems, held together by internal, dynamicbonds. The operation of those bonds is what brings it about that a system of processes behaves in anintegral way, individuating an entity from its environment. And it is the way a biological entity’sinternal processes are organised which determines whether it is able to maintain itself in existence, asan integral whole, throughout its various activities. That its complex of processes works in such a way isthe basis in reality for our identifying it as an entity. An entity’s being a singular whole arises from thespecific activities and interactions of its constituent processes.

Those cohesive systems which are in a far-from-equilibrium state continue to survive only becausethey are recursively self-maintenant. This again is a holistic feature; self-maintenance only makessense if attributed to a system as a functional whole. Since such a process-system can survive onlythrough interacting with its environment and metabolizing what it ingests, if those interactions aregoal-directed, they are a function of its self-maintaining mode of operating. It follows that the goal-directed behaviour manifest in the case of such an entity has to be attributed to the system asa functioning whole. Only autonomous entities can be goal-directed and can err in so doing. This iswhat justifies our speaking of them as agents.

Because actions are performed by agents as functional wholes, the normativity which is inherent intheir goal seeking, and possibly erring, devolves from the whole process system to its sub-processes. Itdoes not build up from lower order to higher order, unless the lower orders are already independentlynormative.5 Even so relatively simple an organism as a bacterium makes this clear; it makes no sense toascribe ‘swimming’ and ‘tumbling’ to anything short of the bacterium as a whole. Yet those are theactivities which are goal-directed, and which might go wrong.

On the other hand, a chain of causation which passes through an organism, but serves no function inits self-maintaining processes or other goal-seeking activities, is not an action that it performs. To takea familiar example, if a doctor testing my reflexes strikes my knee-cap with a hard object, in just theright place, my foot will jerk out. Suppose my foot thereby comes into contact with the doctor. It wouldnot, strictly speaking, be correct to say that I kicked the doctordbut not because I had no desire to do so(although that would be so). Rather, the movement of my foot was caused by a chain of causation whichdid not involve any of the interactive activities which contribute towards my persistence as a self-

4 It is necessary to say ‘‘as a functional whole’’, rather than just ‘‘as a whole’’ without any qualification, because a complexorganism could lose various bits and still manage to function as a whole. For instance, a person can lose a leg or a hand and stillfunction effectively as a human being, although with more difficulty.

5 Although they can participate in still higher level normative emergences, even if they are themselves already normative, asdo human persons in societies, for example.

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maintenant system, nor towards the attainment of any of my generic norms, nor was that movementanticipated by me.

Recent philosophical discussion of human behaviour has become quite confused because of theprevalent failure to recognise that this third characteristic is an essential feature of the logic of action(or if it has been recognized, the usual response is to try to explain it away). The fashionable doctrinethat an action is a bodily movement caused by a desire exemplifies this failure. On that view, genuineagency is dissolved, and the goal-directness of action is shifted to the logical structure of desires. Butsuch an analysis, at best, could only describe a chain of causation which passes through the agent. Theonly ground for saying of someone that she did something is that she was the one who ‘had’ the desire,and that it was via the movements of parts of her body that the desired outcome was effected. (Ona physicalist interpretation, the first of these conditions is also reduced to something of the secondkind.) On this approach, the attribution of the action to a person is justifiable only in terms of thelocation of the causally connected movements within the one human body.

Such crude ‘analyses’ fail to attend to the nature of those organisms which provide the paradigms ofaction. The interesting and fundamental question about autonomous systems is why they do notdegenerate, because of entropy, to sludge in thermodynamic equilibrium. The recursive self-mainte-nance of an organism is what requires the category of action to be predicated of it as an integral action-system. Since what is at issue is the persistence of such systems, as functional wholes, and since theirsurvival can only be described in reflexive languagedas self-maintenancedthe behavioural routineswhich collectively enable such a system to maintain itself in existence can only be attributed to it, asa whole.

In stark contrast to the many attempts to reduce action to causal chains, the model of action I ampresenting explicates action by drawing attention to reflexive loops running from the action-system asa functional whole to particular sub-processes internal to its own functioning, and back again in wayswhich obtain closure. These sub-processes in turn regulate the dynamic flow of energy within thesystem. These recursive loops thereby serve to direct the operation of the whole system. In this way, tosay that an agent does something is to say that it determines itself, a truism Aristotle well understood.Indeed, it was Aristotle’s recognition of this that led him to articulate what the medieval Aristotelianscalled ‘efficient causation’. The ‘efficient cause’ of some change is the agent which brings it about. Themore recent talk of necessary and sufficient conditions, derived from John Stuart Mill, is not anexplication of efficient causation, but an attempt to displace it.

Lest more is read into this vindication of efficient causation than I intend, let me again emphasizethat reclaiming scientific legitimacy for the concepts of action and agency does not imply any attemptto resurrect the entire gamut of Aristotelian metaphysics. For Aristotle and his followers, particularentitiesdwhat the medievals called substantiae, substancesdconstitute the primary category of being.The category of action was dependent upon this primary category. On the contrary, I maintain that bothautonomous entities and their actions are emergent phenomena.

In the relatively simple biological examples which I have mostly been considering, the actions ofsome organism are directly concerned with maintaining the functioning of the system which it is. Inthese cases, an organism’s actions are directed towards whatever is necessary for the survival andpersistence of that system. As we move towards more complex organisms, such as human beings, theends sought become progressively more generic and more diverse, and exemplify other values thansheer survival. Choice and variety amongst goals of widely differing kinds increasingly enter thepicture, as do flexibility and adaptiveness in choosing means to attain the chosen goals. So doessociality, and a drive towards increasing autonomy. But these increases in complexity do nothing toundermine the logical features manifest most clearly in the more primitive examples. Whilst I acttowards many different ends, and seek to satisfy widely diverse generic norms, my actions are alwaysmine; they are functions of that complex dynamic system which I am, as a whole. An action issomething I do.

In summary, when behaviour satisfies these three criteriada) when it is directed towards somegoal, b) when it can be in error, and c) when it is such that it has to be attributed to the system asa wholedit is appropriately described as an action, at least in the minimal sense. Understood in theway I have explicated, these criteria effectively distinguish those phenomena which are genuine casesof autonomous action from those that can be so described only metaphorically.

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5. The actions of bacteria

The above analysis of minimal actions strikes me as entirely plausible. However, many philosophersprofess difficulties in understanding how talk of action, with its implications of agency and inten-tionality, could be reconciled with a scientific view of the world. We certainly speak of ourselves asintentionally performing actions, but they believe such talk is incompatible with scientific objectivity.For these philosophers, agency is a puzzling anomaly in an otherwise physical world, ultimately to beexplained in purely physical termsdor else explained away. Indeed, the denial of agency has beenidentified as one of three distinguishing features of analytic philosophy.6

So, am I, by invoking the language of action, simply falling back upon simple-minded metaphors,something to which ‘the folk’ are prone but which have no place in serious science, or scientifically-informed philosophy? Of course, the implicit claim here that scientific discourse is a metaphor-freezone is plainly falsedas the most cursory glance at quantum physics, for instance, will reveal.Furthermore, the conceptual underpinnings of the analysis I am presenting here draw upon thefindings of recent scientific research. But since the denial of agency is entrenched in so muchcontemporary philosophy and psychology, we will have to work carefully through a number ofobjections which our analysis is sure to encounter.

‘‘Surely’’, it will be said, ‘‘action is self-conscious, intentional behaviour, and only humans arecapable of that’’. Misgivings along these lines are understandable, since there is a strong sense of actionof which that is true. It was because I was mindful of the differences between the behaviour of bacteriaand full-blooded human actions that I proposed the three criteria in the previous section as justifyingthe ascription of minimal action. Despite being understandable, these misgivings are too restrictive anddistorting.

One carefully articulated argument for denying that bacteria can perform actions goes as follows.Perhaps the movements of a bacterium which we called ‘swimming’ and ‘tumbling’ can count asresponsesdbut not as actions in any serious sense. Suppose it is conceded that we may describe thingsthat affect the bacterium as ‘stimuli’, that we may describe the effects of these so-called stimuli as‘behavioural responses’, and that the causal interaction between stimulus and organism involves the‘detection’ of some property of the former by the latter. Still, even if those forms of description areallowed, all that happens when a bacterium ‘detects’ a relevant ‘stimulus’ and ‘responds’ is the lawfulco-variance of a property of the stimulus with a property of the response. This is not enough, it hasbeen argued, to justify ascribing intentional behaviour to bacteria.

According to this argument, the crucial difference between us humans and bacteria, in this regard, isthat a bacterium’s ‘responses’ to stimuli are law-governed, whereas we humans frequently respond towhat we observe in ways which are not. That is, we are often implicated in situations where ourbehaviour comes about as a result of our seeing something which has a certain feature where there arenot lawful relations between that kind of feature and our response to seeing it. On this view, theascription of actions is only legitimate where there is a possibility that an organism’s responses to thedetection of relevant stimuli are not governed by natural laws, and that only happens with humanswhose responses involve their mental representations.7

For all its sophistication, this objection is not convincing. The invocation of law-like regularities istendentious and a red-herring. The ‘laws’ which are alleged to govern the behaviour of bacteria areextremely context-sensitive. For instance, most bacteria can survive and operate only within a narrowrange of temperatures. The concept of ‘law’ must somehow accommodate this sensitivity. One tacticmight be to broaden the concept of law to include all cases of appropriate responses to con-text-sensitive phenomena, in which case it will not provide the required sharp distinction betweenhumans and bacteria. Alternatively, the concept of law might be narrowed by including all thecontextual conditions within the statement of the ‘law’ itself, in which case the ‘regularity’ might be

6 Nicholas Capaldi: ‘Analytic Philosophy and Language’ in Linguistics and Philosophy, ed. R. Harre and R. Harris (PergamonPress, Oxford, 1991) p. 47.

7 See, for example, J. Fodor: ‘Why Paramecia Don’t Have Mental Representations’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy XdStudies inthe Philosophy of Mind, ed. P.A. French, T.E. Uehling & H.K. Wettstein (Uni of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986) pp. 3-23.

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safeguarded, but at the cost of rendering it so particular that it hardly warrants the honorific name of‘law’. Such highly restricted regularities could well be applicable to much of the ‘intentional’ behaviourof humans as well. So, neither of these tactics will sharply distinguish between humans and bacteria.

Furthermore, if it is empirically possible for a bacterium to err in its responses (by swimming upa saccharine gradient) that shows that the connection between the presence of an upward sugargradient and its swimming towards the source of the sugar is not a matter of law-like regularity. To thisrebuttal, it might be replied that there is law-like regularity between the presence of an upwardgradient of sugar or sugar-mimicking substances such as saccharine and the swimming behaviour ofthese bacteria.

That possible reply, however, would miss the point that the proper function of a bacterium’s sugar-detecting mechanism is to detect sugar, not saccharine; its ability to do so is what enables it to survive.But its being tricked by the presence of saccharine shows that its detectors are not infallible. It is just aswell for the future of the species that bacteria are not deceived like this very often; otherwise thespecies might well die out. The fact that the sugar-detectors of these bacteria usually operatesuccessfully is what provides the actual basis of their continuing to survive, manifesting this goal-seeking behaviour.

A philosopher who wishes to press this objection, however, might concede this point, but still insistthat, even if the presence of an upward sugar gradient is not necessary for the bacterium’s swimmingbehaviour, it is nevertheless sufficientdand that is enough to establish law-like regularity. This secondreply, however, assumes that a bacterium’s sugar-detecting apparatus always works perfectly, that it isnever dysfunctional. Of course, if a bacterium’s sugar-detectors do not work properly, it will notoptimise its chances of feeding on sugar, and it probably will die. But that takes nothing away from thepoint that the alleged law-like regularity is sometimes infringed.

The upshot is that the presence of an upward sugar gradient is neither necessary nor sufficient fora bacterium’s swimming behaviour. There is nothing in this counter-argument that justifies the claimthat bacteria cannot perform minimal actions. And note: the counter-argument has been refutedwithout implausibly ascribing intentional states to such a primitive organism, the subject to which theaction is ascribed. Of course, if we were to take the ability to respond selectively to detected featuresthat are not linked by law-like regularities to those responses as criterial for the ascription of inten-tional states,8 then we will have to allow the ascription of intentional states to bacteria. But that isa consequence of this position; indeed, it is a reductio ad absurdum of the plausibility of this proposedcriterion. I conclude that the objection fails, and that we can continue ascribing minimal action to suchprimitive organisms.

6. Self-directed and reflective action

Nevertheless, doubts might persist about ascribing actions to organisms whose behaviour amountsto (virtually) automatic responses to its detection of relevant stimuli. This concern is presumably whatunderlies the tendentious appeal to ‘law-like regularities’. Nevertheless, requiring that an action bea non-automatic response does not restrict actions to humans. There are many kinds of organism,including includes all kinds of mammals, who are flexible learners; their responses to stimuli are notautomatic, and they learn from their failures. Animal behaviour clearly exhibits more subtleties andcomplexities than these crude dichotomies can do justice to.

What is required to accommodate such doubts is a graduated conception of action. The three criteriaabove suffice to pick out minimal actions. Richer concepts of action can be generated by progressivelyadding further criteria to those three. As always, the effect of enriching the concept is to narrow itsextension.

There are two different sorts of circumstance where some sort of selection has to be made amongstpotential actions. One arises when an organism detects, roughly at the same time, two or more changesin its environment, each of which indicates quite different kinds of interaction. The other arises whenmore than one potential interaction is available under a single differentiated condition, and that

8 As Fodor indeed proposes.

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indication does not determine a sole potential action as the one which is apt in that environment. Inaddition to selecting amongst alternative potential interactions, choosing seems also to involve otherfactors, such as the ability to anticipate, to evaluate, and to decide between the likely outcomes ofperforming each of those potential actions. Accordingly, a progressively stronger concept of actionarises as we take into account those kinds of organism whose behaviour not only satisfies the threecriteria for minimal actions, but also manifest one or more of these abilities. If, for instance, self-directed actions cannot be ascribed to an organism unless its selection of what to do is based on itsanticipation and evaluation of likely outcomes of its potential actions, a bacterium’s swimming andtumbling would not count as actions of that sort, whereas a rat’s successful running of a maze would.

The exercise of these abilities becomes increasingly complex and less determinate as the goalssought become increasingly generic, that is, where they do not specify a unique routine of tasks to beperformed in order to satisfy them. Organisms which can learn from the success and failure of theirprevious interactions and can adapt their behaviour flexibly to take account of quite fine-grainedvariations in their ever-changing environment have an even stronger claim for recognition as genuineagents who act. Let us call such behaviour self-directed actions. On these further criteria, self-directedactions can be performed only by agents who are capable of flexible learning.

A yet richer notion of action is invoked if, on top of anticipation and evaluation, deliberatingbetween available choices is required as well, where that ability is taken to require self-conscious-ness. Adding that extra criterion yields an even stronger concept of action, what we might callreflective action. On that basis, not even a rat should be said to perform reflective actions. Only thislast concept of actiondreflective actiondcan plausibly be restricted to humans. Action in the othersenses, which also are goal-directed and oriented to the future, can properly be ascribed to non-human organisms.

One final comment about the criteria which differentiate, in this graduated way, actions inincreasingly stronger senses. I have cast this discussion in terms of ascribing action to organisms. I havedone so because it facilitated the analysis of the concept of minimal action. But lest my proceeding inthis way should lead to misunderstandings, let me make it clear that I am not for a moment suggestingthat action is a concept that we project onto simpler organisms. Rather, my argument is that, providedthe relevant conditions are satisfied, they do perform minimal actions. Since the language of action isjustified in these circumstances, that vindicates my earlier claim that the category of action is meta-physically deep.

7. Intentionality and intentions

Another technical term which has been revived amongst philosophers over the past century whichalso has the sense of directedness, or towardness, is ‘‘intentionality’’. Its revival has turned out to beunfortunate, however, as it has provided yet another source of confusion, which has obscured recog-nition of how ontologically deep-seated is the phenomenon. We need to sort it out.

First, a little history. ‘‘Intentionality’’ was the term regularly used by medieval philosophers (who, ofcourse, wrote in Latin) to characterise the teleological structure of thinking. As Palle Yourgrau haspointed out9:

9 ‘Th‘Intenti

. the very root of the word ‘intentionality’ (making something an object-of-thought, referring):intendo arcum in (I draw a bow at .) (an image for directed thought Plato was also fond of). Torefer to something is to strike it, wherever in the universe it might be, with the arrow of themind. The good archer strikes what is, while the bad catches illusions.

With the rise of modern physics in the 17th Century, the term fell into disuse. Teleological modes ofexplanation, which were part of Aristotelian science, had no place in the new physics inaugurated byGalileo, Descartes, and Locke. But even if Aristotelian ‘final causes’ are ‘useless in physics’, as Descartesmaintained, the concept of action cannot be explicated without some way of characterising their

e Path Back to Frege’ in his edited book Demonstratives (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990), p. 109, citing P.T. Geach:onal Objects’ in Logic Matters (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), p. 147.

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intrinsic directedness. So, when Brentano, late in the 19th Century, wished to emphasise the intrinsicdirectedness of human mental processes, he chose to revive the medieval notion of intentionality,rather than use the despised term derived from the Greek, ‘‘teleology’’. From him, the term then passedthrough the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl into common parlance in the philosophy of mind.

Unfortunately, this history has meant that intentionality is usually taken as a characteristic (forBrentano himself, the distinguishing characteristic) of the human mind, and analytic philosophers havegenerally narrowed its scope further, concentrating on its being a feature of linguistic reference. So thisrevival of the term has not been as helpful as it should; narrowing intentionality down to the mental, oreven further to the linguistic, has obscured how autonomous directedness is a pervasive feature of allliving organisms, including non-human ones.

In this way, the use of this term has reinforced the prejudice that action-talk only makes sense inrelation to humans, who perform actions intentionally. A familiar line of argument picks up on this asfollows. Bacteria, mosquitoes, frogs, and cheetahs do not have intentionsdat least, we have no rationalbasis for ascribing intentions to them. So, until we have a plausible explanation of how intentions leadto actions, we have no right to attribute actions to anything other than humans. Further, once we haveworked out a scientifically-based philosophical psychology, philosophy can dispense with suchnotions, based as they are in nothing better than ‘folk psychology’.

It was to overcome such prejudices that I proposed above three criteria which some occurrence ofself-generated behaviour has to satisfy for it to qualify as a minimal action: that it be goal-directed; thatit could be in error; and that it be attributed to some cohesive system, as a functional whole. On thisbasis, even a bacterium can properly be described as performing actions. The stronger sense of self-directed action adds to those criteria the further requirements that the system be capable of learningand flexible in its responses. In neither of those senses does the concept of conscious intention play anypart. But I am not so sanguine as to believe that simply pointing that out will be sufficient to dispel theobjection just raised. In order to show how misconceived is this way of thinking about action, theobjection has to be tackled head-on.

The first point to note is how this objection trades on an ambiguity. It would be right to say thatactions essentially involve intentionality, if the concept of intentionality could be widened to mean nomore than that actions of any sort always involve towardness. But then, as we have seen, non-humanorganisms also exhibit towardness. On the other hand, it is probably better to respect the usage whichhas now become well established, and take its meaning to be restricted to human subjects and theirmental activities. It is clear from how the argument proceeds that this second interpretation is theappropriate one, but then the argument begs the question.

As the argument uses the adverb ‘‘intentionally’’, its meaning is cognate with the everyday Englishverb ‘‘to intend’’. That psychological verb is properly used in sentences describing a person’s havingsome outcome as his or her deliberate purpose. Influenced by the associations suggested by thisEnglish verb, it is tempting to think that the essential directedness of (human) actions, their inten-tionality, is to be explained in terms of their ‘intentions’, in the sense of what the agent intended to do.That, however, is a false lead. Intentions in this latter sense exhibit the same logical structure as actions;they too are individuated by their intrinsic ends. We can understand a particular agent’s intention onlybecause we understand which potential action would fulfil that intention. The important consequence isthat intentions have to be understood as proto-actions.

Certain philosophers have tried to explain away the intentionality, or teleology, of (human) actionsby ‘analysing’ actions as bodily movements caused by certain mental states, namely, intentions. Thismanoeuvre appears to explain teleology away by substituting for it a causal relation between a mentalstate and a bodily movementdan account which sounds appropriately ‘scientific’. But that appearanceis deceptive. ‘Mental states’ do not have observable features which would enable one to be individu-ated from another. All attempts to get rid of teleology by this counterfeit scientism founder on thesimple fact just noted: what makes one intention distinct from another are the actions which wouldfulfil them. Only by reference to the potential action which would fulfil it can an intention be identified.There is no other way. Consequently, the purported analyses are viciously circular. No advance towardsan explanation of the essential directedness of actions is gained by invoking intentions; rather,intentions themselves have to be explained in terms of the teleology of actions.

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Those philosophers who advocate the ‘analysis’ we are examining have a way of side-stepping thisrebuttal. They start from the thought that, in any and every case of action, its essential towardness (orgoal-directedness) is a matter of having an intention (to do X) and then performing the movementsrequired to carry it out. But now add to that the thought that an intention is an overwhelming desire,a desire that overrides all others in determining which movements will occur next. Then the ‘analysis’can be refined, so that an action is now to be understood as a bodily movement caused by a prevailingdesire. Thereby, the desire in question can be individuated simply as the one that was causally effi-cacious, and the goal-directness of action is shifted to the logical structure of desires.

This too is far from credible; despite its popularity, as a piece of conceptual analysis this accountsuffers from a number of serious flaws. For a start, invoking desires in order to explicate intentions isa cheat. Often when I form an intention, what I desire is not simply that something-or-other be thecase; rather, what I intend is to do something-or-other. If invoking my desires is at all relevant here, ithas to be acknowledged that what I desire is to perform that action. So, invoking desires here does noteliminate the need to have recourse to actions.

Again, the formula that an action is a bodily movement caused by a desire ignores the crucial featureencapsulated in my third criterion, that actions are properly ascribed to an organism as a functionalwhole. Because the motivation behind this formula is to advance a program of reduction, such an‘analysis’ ignores this essential feature of the logic of action.

Furthermore, the plausibility of this formula depends upon its glossing over a crucial distinction.Suppose that I am running in the 100 metres race at an athletics competition. The point of racing, thetelos of that action, is to win. If that were not so, what the participants are doing would not constitutea race. So, insofar as what I am doing is racing, I am participating in an activity whose telos is winning.But all of that is compatible with my having private reasons for not wanting to win. Perhaps I haveaccepted a bribe to let someone else win; perhaps I want my friend to get a psychological boost fromwinning more than I want to win myself. But whatever might be my particular intentions, they candiffer from the intrinsic teleology of the activity in which I am a participant. Note that in this case, Icould not have the private intentions we have imagined, if I were not racing. So, not only does this kindof case show that the intentionality of the activities in which agents participate is not necessarily thesame as the intentions of an individual agent, the ascription of intentions to individuals only makessense provided they are distinguished from actions proper. Similarly, the man who drove the getawaycar for criminals who held up a bank is judged by courts of law to have been a participant in thatrobbery. His act of driving the car was part of the wider act of armed robbery. If his defence is that hedid not rob the bank, since all he intended to do was drive the car, his plea will be of no avail. He will befound guilty, just like his partners in crime, whatever his private intentions might have been. Onceagain, the proffered analysis is viciously circular.

Again, consider lying. Telling a lie is a second-order action, parasitic upon the first-order practice ofassertion, making statements. People lie in order to deceive. That is their private intention. Buta condition of a lie’s success is that the act of telling it is taken by their audience to be a genuineassertion, that is, an act of truth-telling. Unless the audience is deceived into believing (wrongly) thatthe speaker’s personal intent in speaking is the same as the point of the assertion performed, namely,truth-telling, the lie will not be effective as a lie. So lying is a clear case where the telos of an actdaspeech-act of assertiondis at odds with what the agents are intending to do by performing those acts.

Our natural languages explicitly recognize this crucial conceptual gap between the intrinsic telos ofan action and the desires of individuals who perform that action. That is one of the reasons why thoselanguages contain significant auxiliary verbs such as ‘‘try’’, ‘‘attempt’’, ‘‘intend’’, etc. Yet this distinctionhas to be disregarded by those who blithely try to characterise an action as a bodily movement causedby a desire. Their position rests on their failure to analyse carefully the relevant cases. I conclude thatany attempt to reduce intentionality, in the sense of the directedness of actions, to the mental activityof formulating intentions is unsound and misguided.

I said above that it is probably better to restrict the use of the word ‘‘intentionality’’ to humansubjects and their mental activities. Even so, intentionality characterizes more than simply ‘intentions’,in the sense of what some person intends to do. A great deal of human mental activity exhibitsintentionality. The core feature to which that technical term refers is towardness. Not only intending,but also desiring, thinking, perceiving, emotional conditions, indeed almost all mentality are directed

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at something. (The only mental states which perhaps are exceptions to this are moodsdat least, thatwas Heidegger’s view).

How that towardness is to be analysed and explained has engaged the attention of many philos-ophers. But the phenomenon does not seem quite so puzzling once we take seriously the towardness ofevery kind of action, whether performed by human or non-human agents. I earlier claimed thatintentions have to be understood as proto-actions. It is as if we set ourselves to do something, but theinstruction to translate that orientation into bodily movements is withheld from the motor sections ofour brains. I now suggest that that claim can be generalized to all instances of intentionality. Theessential teleology of actions, which is so essential to the very being of every kind of organism, providesthe basic modes of organization from which human intentionality is an emergent phenomenon. Ata fundamental level, both human actions and (almost all) human mentality are characterised by beingintrinsically orientated towards some end. The directedness of our mental conditions, their inten-tionality, derives from the teleology of actions, not vice versa.