AGENCY AND THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGE

It has long been supposed that the intentional attitudes — beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like — have a central place in the aetiology of intelligent behaviour. Actions are most naturally seen as bodily movements induced — or, in the case of refrainings, inhibited — in part by appropriate constellations of beliefs and desires. Aristotle puts it succinctly: ‘The origin of action — its efficient, not its final cause — is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end’ (Nicomachean Ethics VI, ii, 1139a). This conception of action incorporates two distinct components, one intentional, one causal: Actions are performed in light of agents' reasons, and reasons influence agents' trajectories through the world. Beliefs, for instance, encompass both a particular intentional or propositional content and a measure of somatic efficacy. What one does depends in some measure on what one believes. Further, the effects of a belief within an agent's psychological economy vary with its content. If Clara wants some soup and believes that this bowl contains soup, then, other things being equal, she will take steps to consume the bowl's contents. Were she to believe that the bowl contained dishwater, she would behave differently.