Motor Representation and The Problem of Action

What justifies claiming that events are actions in virtue of their relations to your intentions rather than in virtue of their relations to motor representations?

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The Problem of Action is, What distinguishes your actions from things that merely happen to you?

According to the Standard Solution, actions are those events which stand in an appropriate causal relation to an intention. (See Philosophical Theories of Action.)

We have seen that motor representations can ground the directedness of actions to outcomes (Motor Representations Ground the Directedness of Actions to Goals).

How might this give rise to an objection to the Standard Solution?

Background: The Structure of Action

When researchers focus on the contrast between goal-directed processes and habitual processes (see Instrumental Actions: Goal-Directed and Habitual), they typically treat actions as unitary and ignore their structure.

What does this mean? Actions are individuated by outcomes—the question ‘What is she doing?’ can often be answer by specifying an outcome like ‘opening the bottle’ or ‘washing their hair’. Similarly when characterising habitual and goal-directed processes, we individuate possible actions by outcomes such as the operating of a lever or the eating of popcorn. We give no consideration to the structure of these actions.

What do we know about their structure? Operating a lever involves performing several actions such as reaching for, grasping and then moving it (as we saw in Motor Representation). These component actions are related to the main action as means to ends. And a component action may itself have component actions also related as means to ends. So even an apparently, small-scale simple action like operating a lever involves a hierachy of component actions. Further, the component actions often overlap in time, and, when things go well, are minutely coordinated to meet both relational constraints (how many fingers you will grasp with constrains, and is constrained by, how you reach, for instance) and also background requirements such as the need not to topple over when reaching.^[1] All this involves sustained coordination of many rapidly moving body part in response to a changing environment, which is very difficult to acheive, as we know from studies of how the skills needed to perform mundane actions develop.^[2]

More background on how actions are individuated and the hierarchical structure of action is covered in another course, Mind & Reality, here: https://mind-and-reality.butterfill.com/lecture_10_tube.html#action_basic_principles

When thinking about the contrast between goal-directed processes and habitual processes, we focus on the question

How are relatively large-scale action goals selected?

This question involves treaing actions as unitary and ignoring their structure. When thinking about motor processes, we focus on questions about structure such as:

Given that a relatively large-scale action goal has been selected, how is the action to be prepared, performed and monitored? And, in particular (for us), how are component action goals selected?

These questions capture complementary perspectives. Treating them separately has proven productive. Eventually both are needed to understand the story of action.

Objection to the Standard Solution

Consider an alternative to the Standard Solution:

Actions are those events which stand in an appropriate causal relation to a motor representation.

The Objection is then:

1. This solution to The Problem of Action is not worse than the Standard Solution.

2. Therefore we should accept both or neither, as things stand.

The justification for (1) is three-fold. First, the role of motor representations overlaps with that of intentions (see Motor Representations Ground the Directedness of Actions to Goals). Second, as far as bodily actions are concerned, intention without motor represention is not sufficient. Third, no explicit justification has yet been published for giving priority to intentions over motor representations.

Responses to the Objection

One response to this Objection would be to abandon the Standard Solution as the unique answer to The Problem of Action in favour of an alternative. The simplest (but not necessarily correct) alternative might be to allow that the Standard Solution is just one among several ways to answer The Problem of Action.

Another response to this Objection would be to defend the Standard Solution by identifying considerations that favour adopting it over the above alternative. This might (but need not) involve appealing to the idea that actions are done for reasons. In developing a response along these lines, it is important not to change the question by switching The Problem of Action for an alternative. (It’s almost trivial that there is some question to which the Standard Solution is the correct answer; our concern, of course, is with whether it is the correct answer to The Problem of Action.) Would invoking the idea that actions are done for reasons amount to changing the question? Insofar as our source is Davidson (1963), it seems reasonable to hold that this idea was implicit all along. If relying on Frankfurt (1978), things are less clear because he sees the problem as applying to a very broad range of agents, including some in which learning and cognition play at most a limited role.^[3]

Contrast with Other Objection to the Standard Solution

Another objection to the Standard Solution hinges on the ideas that actions can be dominated by habitual processes and run counter to any intentions the agent has (see The Problem of Action meets Habitual Processes).

On that objection, the key idea is that, in some cases, intentions are not involved at all (or at least are not appropriately related to actions). A common line of objection to this objection is to attempt to distinguish the bad actions (as ‘merely purposive activities’, perhaps) from the good actions (as ‘autonomous actions’, perhaps; Velleman, 2000; see Question Session 02).

The present objection from discoveries about motor control is consistent with the view that all actions are appropriately related to intentions.^[4] There is no way to reply to this objection by distinguishing good from bad actions.

The two objections to the Standard Solution are therefore complementary in the sense that different strategies are probably needed to reply to them.

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