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Introduction: Why Investigate Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science?

Lecture 01

Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science

[email protected]

This course is based on a simple challenge.

challenge

Discover why people act,
individually and jointly.

We will consider how this challenge is met using three methods: philosophical, psychological and the formal methods familiar from economics.

Integration Question

Where there are philosophical, psychological and formal theories which appear to target a single set of phenomena while saying incompatible things about it, we face two questions:

are they actually inconsistent?

if so: how, if at all, should either or both theories be refined?

These questions pose the Integration Question.

We are really interested in general truths about why people act, of course. But let’s start with a concrete case.

Why are you here?

Discuss in pairs. Then pass notes forwards.

Am genuinely interested but also want to illustrate a philosophical point

In asking you this question, I was assuming you could answer it. More, I was assuming a Simple Picture of Action.

When you act,

there are reasons why you act;

you know the reasons;

you act because you know the reasons; and

the reasons justify your action. make your action intelligible.

My purpose in asking you this question requires that each of these claims are true.

Of course we sometimes act out of emotions like love or jealousy where much of the point of the action is that it is not justfified in the sense that someone else might be persuaded by the reasons for your action. (Love makes you do many unreasonable things.)

But the reasons should at least justify in the sense that they make it intelligible why someone who had your perspective would have acted in that way.

How can we turn this into a theory? Is it true?

This is the basic picture that nearly all philosophers start from in attempting to meet the challenge.

The philosophers have mostly been concerned to find the best way of turning this simple picture into a systematic theory.

It’s just here that psychology and other behavioural sciences are relevant ...

Behavioural sciences contribute two things

We can draw on them in turning the simple picture into a theory (decision theory and game theory are supposed to be elaborations of what it is to be rational).

And, more insterestingly, we can draw on them to show that the simple picture is either wrong or else only a very small part of the answer.

three illustrations

three illustrations of things we will study that create problems for the simple picture.

first illustrations of something we will study that creates problems for the simple picture.

game theory

Looking ahead with some illustrations to whet your appetite

We will explore game theory as an attempt to explains why things happen

Game theory is particularly interesting has an enormously wide range of applications.

It can be applied to understanding interactions between people but it can also be applied to understanding relations between whole countries. It can also be applied to understanding the ways that bacteria occupy different spaces and propagate ... or indeed it can be used to explain the reproductive behavior of side botched lizards ...

illustration : side-botched lizzards

I’ll say a bit more about this example later in the course, but for now the interesting thing is that there are three types of male pattern ... aggressive, dovish and sneaker (looks like a female).

The question is how this is a stable configuration; and it turns out that we can use game theory to explain this—they are involved, in effect, in a game of rock paper scissors.

I was saying that game theory is that it has such a wide variety of applications. It promises us simple principles that explain both the structure of sophisticated human interactions and the morphology of side-botched lizzards

But this leads to a challenge ...

I do not think that side-botched lizzards know the reasons for their morphologies.

If we take seriously the idea that game theory provides as at least part of an explanation for why you act then it's hard to accept that this simple story could be right that's because when it comes to the countries or the side botched lizards or the bacteria The Simple Story probably isn't true

but it looks like game theory is just doing the same thing it's just working in the same way so there's a kind of challenge here how are you going to put those two things together

we're impressed by the thought that people whove studied formalizable theories of action have made huge progress It's been a really great success story with many useful applications

we're also going to be impressed that the simple story seems like a fairly good starting point and has been endorsed by lots of philosophers.

but the two things don't seem to fit together unless you're prepared to think that the bacteria the lizards and the countries know reasons and that that knowledge explains partly why they act and those reasons justify their actions

When you act,

there are reasons why you act;

you know the reasons;

you act because you know the reasons; and

the reasons justify your action. make your action intelligible.

To the extent that your actions are organised along the same lines that characterise the sexual strategies of side-botched lizzards, can there be a big role for reasons and your knowledge of reasons?

1. Game-theoretic explanations do not involve knowledge of reasons.

2. Game-theoretic explanations do apply to some human actions.

∴

3. Not all human actions involve knowledge of reasons.

challenge

Discover why people act,
individually and jointly.

Integration Question

anarchic hand syndrom from dr strangelove (Della Sala, Marchetti, & Spinnler, 1991)

anarchic hand syndrome

‘The right hand frequently carried out complex activities that were not willed by G.C.

These activities were clearly goal-directed and were well executed, but undesired by the patient, who used her left hand to try to stop them.

For example, when the patient had a steaming cup of tea in front of her, the right hand proceeded to pick it up and bring it to her mouth, even though the patient knew that it was too hot and had just said she would wait a few moments until it had cooled.

Nevertheless it needed the intervention of her left hand to replace the cup on the table.’

(Della Sala et al., 1991, p. 1114)

Believe it or not, this rare syndrom tells us something important about why all humans act. Or so I will attempt to show you (much) later in the course.

Challenges unity and therefore the idea that there is a single coherent body of reasons that are known.

If your body comprises multiple motivational systems which can work against each other, should we be confident that you have reasons for your actions?

Anarchic hand syndrome presents a challenge to the simple Picture about actions that I started with because it suggests that there is a lack of unity within the person

if in order for one hand to be doing something that another hand is trying to prevent we can't imagine that there is a single set of reasons which explain why this person acts

so the Simple Picture seems to presuppose some kind of unity and that seems to be missing in cases of anarchic hand syndrome

OBJECTION: you might say well look Steve those are just kind of like really marginal cases and of course this story won't work where there are neurophysiological disorders

REPLY: I think the problem raised by conditions like anarchic hand syndrome is a little bit deeper than that I think the problem raised by this story is that actually in you and I there is also the same kind of lack of unity that we find manifested in AHS patients it's just that that lack of unity in our cases is less often manifested so clearly clearly but the multiple motivational and action control processes in us nevertheless still exist.

[do not use -- only here in case someone asks]

challenge

Discover why people act,
individually and jointly.

Integration Question

The Thought here generally is if you look about if you look at psychological theories about the control of action you'll quickly see that it's very hard to put those together with the Simple Picture of Why People Act.

but those psychological theories seem to be relatively successful so it's not really clear kind of what you should do there

third and final illustration comes from what's usually called animal learning

habitual processes

so here's a rat and the rat has been trained to press something it's supposed to be a kind of lever here and every time the rat presses the lever it gets a reward and again you can do this with rats you can also do this with humans and in generally speaking you get the same interesting pattern here what happens here is if you reward somebody for performing an action in the presence of a stimulus typically speaking they will then continue to perform that action in the presence of the stimulus long after it's no longer rewarding so this is the kind of Mark of a habitual process even after something is no longer rewarding take away the reward the pattern of behavior will persist

challenge

Discover why people act,
individually and jointly.

you can probably imagine what I'm going to say here. if we take that Simple Picture of Why People Act about reasons for action and the reasons explain why you act and justify your actions the existance of Habitual processes is a good indicator that that story can't be the whole story about Human Action because we like rats are driven by these habitual processes so again if you take research on animal learning this has been enormously successful in explaining Behavior some tremendous breakthroughs over the last century or so it's very hard to put that together with a philosophical theory about action

challenge

Discover why people act,
individually and jointly.

There are three kinds of theory we can use to meet the challenge.

It turns out that the three kinds of theory are not obviously compatible with each other, although there is much to be said for each.

Our job is to (i) uncover the apparent inconsistencies between different disciplines’ theories, (ii) work out whether the inconsistencies are real, and (iii) if so which theory to accept and how to revise the other discipline’s theory.

THAT’S WHAT THIS COURSE IS ABOUT

As it’s a philosophy course, we start with the philosophical theories and use these as an anchor.

That’s why I’m pushing this Simple Picture of Why People Act. (Which is supposed to capture common ground between Anscombe and Davidson, the philosophers who dominate contemporary views.)

As I said, the challenge is to discover why people act, individually and jointly

challenge

Discover why people act,
individually and jointly.

When you act,

there are reasons why you act;

you know the reasons;

you act because you know the reasons; and

the reasons justify your action. make your action intelligible.

How can we turn this into a theory? Is it true?

To discovery why people act, we need to consider not only philosophical and psychlogical theories and evidence for them but also , formal models, nonhumans and neuropschological edge cases.

Still here? That’s great. You are very welcome.

Philosophical Issues

Behavioural Science:

from Individual
to Collaborative
Action

Keyboard Shortcuts?f

Introduction: Why Investigate Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science?

Lecture 01

Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science

[email protected]

Keyboard Shortcuts`?f`