it isn't what you think: a new idea about intentional causation

It Isn't What You Think: A New Idea About Intentional CausationAuthor(s): Colin AllenSource: Noûs, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 115-126Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215729 .

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NOUS 29:1 (1995) 115-126

It Isn't What You Think: A New Idea About Intentional Causation

COLIN ALLEN

Texas A&M University

1 Introduction

Proponents of the view that token mental states are identical to token physical states are prone to the worry that the token-identity theory commits them to believing that mental properties are epiphenomenal-a worry that Fodor (1987/ 1990) lampoons with the label "epiphobia." Dretske's (1988) version of the epiphobic worry appears as "the soprano problem" (Horgan, 1991) which suggests that the semantic or intentional properties of brain states may be as causally inert with respect to behavior as the meaning of a soprano's vocalization is inert with respect to the vocalization's glass-shattering effects. Opinions are divided about the success of Dretske's own solution to the soprano problem (see contribu- tions to McLaughlin, 1991); some philosophers even seem to think that Dretske's view entails epiphenomenalism, and seem willing to bite the epiphenomenalist bullet. For example, Segal & Sober (1991, p. 28) say: "If ... some theory like Dretske's is true, then semantic properties may be [causally] inert.... If semantic properties do turn out to be epiphenomenal, this should cause no great de- pression."

Other philosophers have been ready to bite the bullet of epiphenomenalism for a long time, for a variety of reasons including those under discussion here. For example, Dennett (1969) likened the ascription of content to brain states to providing an interpretation for a formal symbol system, "a move which does not affect its functions or implications but may improve intuitive understanding of the system" (1969, p. 79), and Stich (1983) argued for the virtues of a syntactic theory of mind that eschews semantic interpretations for the purpose of scientific explanation. Kazez (in press) also argues that the causal irrelevance of intentional properties is a consequence of computational views of the mind.

In this paper I analyze a standard argument for the conclusion that intentional

(C) 1995 Basil Blackwell, Inc., 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.

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1 6 NOCS

properties are irrelevant to causal explanations of behavior. I then analyze an analogous argument for the conclusion that the property of genuineness is irrelevant to causal explanations of the effects that twenty-dollar bills have on human agents, and I indicate a way in which this argument fails. I then apply the lessons learned from the example of genuineness to articulate a defense for the causal relevance of intentional properties. I end the paper by discussing several objections to this defense.

2 An Argument for the Causal Irrelevance of Intentional Properties

One initially plausible argument to support the epiphobic worry goes like this. Given that (human) mental states are token-identical to brain states, mental states possess (intrinsic) neurological properties. The intentional properties of a state are distinct from its neurological properties-the intentional properties may, for instance, depend on their functional role as on most functionalist accounts, on historical facts about evolution (Millikan, 1984) or learning (Dretske, 1988), or on environmental facts, as in various other externalist views about content, such as those of Putnam (1975) and Burge (1979). But the neurological properties of any particular brain state are sufficient to explain its behavioral effects-ceteris paribus any state with the same neurological properties would cause the same behavior. Thus it seems that intentional properties are irrelevant to scientific causal explanations of behavior.

This argument, as I have stated it, does not make explicit what criterion of causal relevance is being applied. If this criterion were to be made explicit, the general form of the argument would contain the following elements:

1. A premiss asserting that intentional (or semantic) properties of brain states are distinct from the (intrinsic) properties of brain states.

2. A premiss asserting the sufficiency of intrinsic physical or neurological properties of brain states for causally explaining the behavioral effects of such states.

3. A premiss (implicit above) that provides a criterion for causal relevance which when combined with the other premises entails that intentional properties are not relevant to the explanation of behavior.

One way to make the third premiss explicit is to adopt the following principle (slightly modified from a suggestion by David Braun):

For all events c and e and all properties F: if c is a cause of e and it might have been the case that c caused e despite lacking F, then c's having F is causally irrelevant to e.

Other suggestions to be found in the literature vary considerably in vocabulary and details. For example, Fodor (1990, p. 138) offers the following:



INTENTIONAL CAUSATION 117

Stipulation: A property is "causally responsible" iff it affects the causal powers of things that have it. And (also by stipulation) all properties that aren't causally responsible are epiphenomenal.

Braun (1991) convincingly argues that the notion of causal power that Fodor invokes is rather obscure and probably best avoided. In this paper I do not wish to sort through the various alternative analyses of causal relevance of properties. Braun (in press) makes such an effort redundant; he also argues in favor of an analysis of causal relevance of properties different from either of those suggested here. For my purposes it suffices to point out that all the proposed analyses of which I am aware concern the relevance of a thing's possession of a property to its effects. I shall argue that even if intentional properties of brain states fail to be causally relevant to their owner's behavior in this way, they may nonetheless be causally relevant to behavior in a different way.

My strategy is to compare the argument above to an analogous argument that purports to show that the property of being genuine is causally irrelevant to the effects of twenty-dollar bills. In its application to genuineness, a crucial ambi- guity in the argument becomes clear, revealing an important distinction between two ways in which genuineness might be causally relevant to twenty-dollar bills. I argue that the resulting distinction can be applied to support the causal relevance of intentional properties to the effects of brain states on behavior.

3 Genuineness

Suppose you hand me a twenty-dollar bill and I return change. All genuine twenty-dollar bills possess (intrinsic or non-relational) physical properties such as material content, size, layout of ink lines, etc. Any physical object possessing these intrinsic properties would have had the same effect, ceteris paribus, on my change-producing behavior. Let us call the physical type to which such tokens belong "20$NOTEs". Whether a given 20$NOTE is a genuine twenty-dollar bill depends on certain historical facts about its origin, such as where and by whose authority it was printed, and these facts are distinct from its intrinsic physical properties. But the intrinsic physical properties of any particular 20$NOTE are sufficient to explain its effects on behavior. (Otherwise, counterfeiting would be an unenticing crime.) It seems, then, that genuineness is irrelevant to scientific causal explanations of the effects of 20$NOTEs.

Even with a standard premiss about causal relevance supplied, I contend that this argument is unsound. To see why, it is helpful to think about 20$NOTEs that are not genuine twenty-dollar bills. Ceteris paribus, if there were 20$NOTEs but no genuine twenty-dollar bills, or if the frequency of 20$NOTEs that were not twenty-dollar bills was sufficiently high, 20$NOTEs would not elicit change- producing behavior, etc., because their expected value would be too low. It is only because some (or sufficiently many) 20$NOTEs are genuine twenty-dollar bills that 20$NOTEs cause the behavior in humans that they cause. What ratio of



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counterfeits to genuines can be tolerated is a matter for empirical investigation guided by economic theory, but it appears that any explanation of the effects of counterfeit notes will make reference to genuine ones.

Consider now a genuine twenty: whether or not its genuineness is irrelevant to its effects on the behavior of humans who handle it-in the absence of physical differences (ceteris paribus) an individual would treat the note the same no matter where it came from-plausibly, if there were no genuine twenties at all, it would not have these effects. It is important, then, to distinguish between the weaker possibility that any particular 20$NOTE should have the same causal properties while lacking the properties that would make it genuine, and the stronger possibility that all the 20$NOTEs should have the same causal properties yet lack the properties that would make them genuine. I One can consistently accept the weak possibility while denying the strong one. To deny the strong possibility is to maintain that necessarily, if there are 20$NOTEs with the given causal properties, then there are genuine 20$NOTEs with those properties.2 (The ceteris paribus clauses in the counterfactuals above affect our interpretation of the modal claims being made here; this is discussed in section 6 below).

In section 2 I pointed out that standard ways of making the criterion for causal relevance explicit refer to the relevance of something's possession of a property to a particular effect of that thing. The discussion in this section suggests that this is not the only way in which a property may be causally relevant to the effect- other things having that property may be causally relevant. Even if we grant that the causal-irrelevance argument applied to genuineness establishes the weaker possibility that the genuineness of any particular 20$NOTE is irrelevant to its effects on the change-producing behavior of those who handle it, this is not sufficient to establish the conclusion that predications of genuineness have no role to play in causal explanations of such behavior. This conclusion requires that the stronger possibility also be established, but to establish this possibility one would have to supply an additional empirical premiss that, in the case of genuineness, seems rather implausible.

My colleague Michael Hand suggests we refer to this defense of causal relevance as the "transcendental defense" because it defends genuineness on the grounds that the genuineness of some 20$NOTEs is a necessary but empirically established condition for the effectiveness of all 20$NOTEs in eliciting certain kinds of behavior.

4 Intentional Properties

This analysis suggests a defense for the causal relevance of intentional properties that can be exploited by token-identity theorists. Namely, one can try to make it plausible that the two possibilities can come apart for intentional properties as they did for genuineness. For the sake of this paper, I will simply grant that the causal irrelevance argument applied to intentional properties does establish the weaker first possibility-namely that any particular brain state might cause




the same behavior despite lacking the intentional properties in question. My task is to make it plausible that the stronger second possibility could fail to hold even if the first is properly derived; in other words, the task is to make it plausible that the particular effects of brain states depend on at least some of them having the intentional properties in question.

There is no consensus about the proper analysis of intentionality and it would be well beyond the scope of this paper to provide one. Instead, I will focus on the referential character of mental states: namely that they (sometimes) refer to entities external to the brain. Sometimes reference fails,(as, e.g., with beliefs about fairies). I take it to be uncontroversial, however, that sometimes our thoughts are about the Parthenon, hence they successfully refer to the Parthenon. Given a token-identity theory, it follows that some of our brain states refer. They also cause behavior that alters our probability of survival. Now, if brain states never successfully referred it is, perhaps, conceivable that survival would be unaffected-these brain states could nonetheless result in viable behaviors-but the world being the inhospitable place that it is, it seems reasonable to think that some degree of referential success is essential for survival and hence that the intentional property of having a reference is itself essential for survival. Note, however, that whether this intuition is correct is an empirical question. It may turn out that the semantic property of referential success is not relevant to survival. But the point here is not to argue for the truth of the ceteris paribus principle that if no brain states possessed intentional properties, brain states would not have the causal properties that they do. Rather, the point is that the causal-irrelevance argument of section 2 should not be judged sound without an explicit denial of this principle.

In at least one respect, Millikan's (1984, 1993) account lends itself nicely to an analogy between mental states and twenty-dollar bills. She argues that a molecule for molecule duplicate of a human being which came into existence as the result of a cosmic accident might be conscious and possess other non- intentional mental properties, but it "would have no ideas, no beliefs, no inten- tions, no aspirations, no fear, and no hopes" (1984, p. 93). The intentionality of an organism's brain states is determined, on her view, by the adaptive role of brain states in ancestor organisms. For Millikan, then, intentional properties are explicitly historical (teleofunctional) and do not supervene on intrinsic physical properties alone. In this respect, intentionality is much like genuineness of 20$NOTEs. Molecule for molecule duplicates would behave identically in all situations, all other things being equal, so that current intentional properties are causally irrelevant to the immediate effects of particular tokens possessing those physical properties. But human beings exist only because our ancestors managed to reproduce, and, quite possibly, part of the explanation of their reproductive success involves a regular (but not necessarily frequent) correspondence between their brain states and their environments. If this is right, we only have brain states with the behavioral effects they in fact have because of the intentionality of some



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(ancestral) brain states. It should be noted that Millikan explicitly denies that the semantic properties of brain states have "causal powers' (1993, p. 186) but this is explained by the fact that she (implicitly) adopts a criterion for causal relevance that considers only the relevance of a state's intentional properties to the effects of that very state on its owner's behavior.

On the present account, the intentional properties of an individual brain state need not be causally relevant to its particular effects. Rather, the system as a whole requires a certain level of referential hits to keep going, in much the same way that 20$NOTEs have to be genuine often enough to keep people using them as mediums of exchange. The "system" here can be characterized as an evolutionary lineage that proliferates by reproduction subject to natural selection, or as an individual whose survival is determined by adaptive behavior that is subject to learning. In other words, intentionality may be important across generations, as in Millikan's account, or within an individual organism, as in Dretske's (1981, 1988) account. Precisely what level of non-referring brain states can be tolerated in either system is a matter for empirical discovery, just as it is a matter for empirical discovery to find out what proportion of counterfeit twenties can be tolerated' in the monetary system. If we know how a creature's internal states are supposed to correspond with environmental features then how much they do correspond is an empirical question. All that a creature requires is that its internal states do not result in behavior lethal to itself or its reproductive success, and it is an open question how well its internal states must correspond to the environment to achieve this.

The comparison here between the monetary system and systems of intentionality may need further elaboration. After all, it is clear how a single economy may contain both kinds of 20$NOTEs-those that are genuine twenties and those that aren't-but it may not be so clear how two states of a given neurological type might belong to the same system yet fail to have the same intentional properties.

Consider, first, a case where the system in question is an evolutionary lineage. Suppose one bee does a dance as a consequence of its inherited mechanisms while another does the same dance because of some random mutation in its nervous system (perhaps it even does nothing but dance this particular dance). Both dances may cause other bees to set off in a certain direction, while (accord- ing, e.g., to the account elaborated by Millikan, 1984, 1993) only one of them really means that there is nectar in that direction. However, the effectiveness of both may depend (as a matter of fact) on the structures in the responding bees and those structures in turn are present because they were selected for in the context of bee dances that more or less accurately represented the locations of nectar. Thus, within such a system, we can see both how two states with the same intrinsic properties might have different intentional properties, and how the intentional properties of some might provide a background condition for the causal interac- tions of them all.




Now consider the case where the system in question is an individual organism. Could a human being, e.g., have two type-identical neural states with different intentional properties? Yes, if as a consequence of learning, earlier tokens of some neural type may initially represent nothing, but later come to represent something, or initially represent one thing, but come to represent something else. A Dretskean view of the role of learning in determining function could then be invoked to show how the effects of a particular brain state on its owner's behavior depend on the intentional properties of its predecessors within the same individual. For example, whether a certain neurological state causes me to search for an umbrella will depend on my having learned about the correspondence of similar earlier states to the occurrence of rain. Hence the present effects of that state will depend on the intentionality of those earlier states, given Dretske's information-theoretic account of intentionality. Even though the neurological features of those states are sufficient to account for their immediate effects, there will be true counterfactuals (subject to the usual ceteris paribus restrictions) that make reference to the intentionality of similar states in the organism to account for the hookup between internal states and behavior.

It is important to reiterate here that these accounts based in theories by Millikan and Dretske are provided only as examples. Other accounts of intentionality may turn out to be compatible with token-identity theory and the transcendental defense being sketched here. Nothing here should be taken as consti- tuting an argument that intentionality is causally relevant to behavior. That is an empirical matter. The point is just that the causal-irrelevance argument in section 2 is invalid.

Readers may also be worried by an apparent disanalogy between the cases of 20$NOTEs and brain states: the behavioral effects of 20$NOTEs seem to depend on what people believe about the genuineness of such notes, whereas the behavioral effects of brain states do not depend on what is believed about their intentionality. In order to see whether this worry can be turned into an objection, it will be helpful for me to lay out my argument schematically:

1. Any particular 20$NOTE would have effects E whether or not it was genuine. (Granted for the sake of argument.)

2. It does not follow from 1 that 20$NOTEs would have effects E if none of them were genuine. (Point of logic, see section 3 and footnotes.)

3. (It is a plausible empirical hypothesis that) 20$NOTEs have effects E because sufficiently many of them are genuine. (Argued for in section 3.)

4. (Thus) There is a ("transcendental") sense in which genuineness is causally relevant to the effects E of 20$NOTEs. (From 3.)

5. (Thus) The argument (for the causal irrelevance of genuineness) presented at the beginning of section 3, even though it establishes 1 (granted), does not entail the causal irrelevance of genuineness. (From 2 and 4 and the fact



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that the truth of the argument's premises-granted to establish 1-is consistent with the truth of 3.)

6. The argument (for the causal irrelevance of intentionality) at the beginning of section 2 is formally equivalent to the argument at the beginning of section 3. (Inspection of arguments.)

7. The intentional counterpart to premise 4 is also an empirical hypothesis. (By analogy to genuineness; see this section.)

8. Thus the epiphobia-inducing argument at the beginning of section 2, even if it entails the intentional counterpart of premise 1, does not provide the empirical information required to support its conclusion that intentional properties are irrelevant to scientific causal explanations of behavior. (From 5, 6 and 7.)

Given my argument laid out in this way, it is possible to see the worry about the role of beliefs about genuineness either as providing an objection to premise 3, or as providing an objection to the analogical step 7. I will consider each of these objections in turn.

First, even if beliefs about genuineness do play an intermediate role, it does not follow that genuineness itself plays no causal role. The key here is to notice that it is at least a plausible empirical hypothesis that beliefs in the genuineness of certain 20$NOTEs are themselves dependent on the frequency of genuine twenties in circulation. So, genuineness itself can still play the right kind of transcendental role, and the involvement of beliefs about genuineness provides no grounds for doubting premise 3.

The second point of attack is the reasoning by analogy in step 7. Of course, the mere existence of a disanalogy is not by itself sufficient to call an analogical inference into question-it is incumbent on the objector to explain why the disanalogy is relevant to the inference that is being drawn. I believe the considerations already advanced in the previous paragraph provide grounds for thinking that the disanalogy is not significant in this case. Another way to diffuse the worry would be to come up with other examples of properties that do not suffer from this disanalogy yet show the same kind of transcendental relevance to causation. The property of tastiness is of interest here. The tastiness of a particular apple will not matter to the animal that takes the first bite out of it-ceteris paribus, an identical apple that was not tasty would elicit the same biting behavior. Surely, however, the tastiness of some apples is a causally relevant background condition for the effects that apples have on biting behavior. If one allows that taste can condition behavior even in the absence of beliefs about apples or taste (at least in some animals), the disanalogy involving intermediary beliefs is no longer present. (The example of tastiness is also interesting because it is not a conventional property, unlike genuineness. A number of commentators on earlier versions of this paper expressed unease about the conventional nature of genuineness.)




5 Twin-Earth

So far I have said nothing about Twin-Earth cases, although these play a consid- erable role in the literature on this topic. Twin-Earth cases serve to provide intuitions about the role of intentional properties in the causation of behavior, by providing examples of neurally indistinguishable brain states having different intentional properties, but having the same effects in all contexts (or having the same "causal powers" as it is usually put). These intuitions serve to support the second premiss of the schematized argument in section 2-i.e., that the intrinsic neurological properties of brain states are sufficient to explain the behavioral effects of such states.

Since the transcendental defense does not challenge that premise, the role of Twin-Earth cases in supporting it need not be challenged here. Nonetheless, against the background of Twin-Earth cases, the transcendental defense can seem puzzling. Although one can see why the genuineness of twenty dollar bills might be relevant to effects of the fake ones, why should the intentional properties of Earthian brain states have anything to do with the behavioral effects of Twin- Earthian brain states? How could properties in one world be relevant to effects in another?

I base my answer to these questions on a modification of a suggestion by Adams (1991). Consider my desire D for water to drink and the neurologically indistinguishable desire Twin-D of Twin-Me. Why, on Earth, does D tend to result in my drinking H20? Well, for instance, because D causes me to say "Bring water!" and because of the background condition that Earth is the kind of place where tokens of "Bring water!" typically mean to bring H20. Why, on Twin-Earth, does Twin-D tend to result in Twin-Me drinking XYZ? The relevant background condition is that on Twin-Earth, tokens of "Bring water!" typically mean to bring XYZ. Now, D and Twin-D are supposed to have the same effect in all contexts. So, when we bring Twin-Me to Earth, we now need to explain why his desire Twin-D causes him to utter "Bring Water!" and drink H20. The answers differ: the effect of Twin-D on his verbal behavior is accounted for by the conditions on Twin-Earth in which this disposition was honed; the effect of Twin- D on his drinking behavior is at least partly explained by the fact that the Earth is a place where tokens of the same neurological type as Twin-D typically result in their owners being supplied with H20, which in turn will depend on the typical intentional properties of such tokens. Mutatis mutandis for my desire D on Twin- Earth. Note that the transcendental defense does not require that a given intentional property be relevant to every effect of brain states; it is enough if it is relevant to some.

The upshot of this is that if one casts the net of contexts widely enough (i.e. across worlds) then there is a clear sense in which the intentionality of Earthian brain states is relevant to the possible behavioral effects (a.k.a. "causal powers") of Twin-Earthian brain states. On the other hand, if one makes the set of contexts



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narrow enough, if, for example, one is only interested in explaining the behavioral effects of brain states within the world in which they occur, then the intentional properties of brain states in other worlds will not be relevant. The intentional properties of brain states in the same world may, however, be relevant to those effects, for the reasons already given. This is all that is required for the transcendental defense.

6 The Proper Reading of the Modal Claims

An objection: If (as Russell once suggested) the world had sprung into existence a few minutes ago, then (on, e.g., Millikan's account of cosmic accidents) none of us would have intentional states, although our behavior would be no different. If Russell's scenario is possible then it would seem also that everything sharing the intrinsic properties of our brains could lack intentionality but possess the same behavioral effects.

The response here is to pay attention to the ceteris paribus conditions in which the relevant counterfactuals must be assessed. If the world had sprung into existence ten minutes ago exactly as is, then the counterfactuals about 20$NOTEs that were expressed above would also be false. But the modal claims made in sections 3 and 4 above must be considered as restricted to worlds pretty much like this one. Given certain facts about human psychology, society, and commer- cial practices, as well as specific facts about the political system in the United States of America in the late 20th century, 20$NOTEs have certain effects on human behavior. These conditions are packed into the ceteris paribus qualifica- tions. Given those conditions it is clear that 20$NOTEs depend for their effects on at least some of them being genuine twenty-dollar bills. Thus it is appropriate to discount Russell's possibility (and perhaps any too outlandish Twin-Earth cases) in formulating our causal principles about economic systems. Analogous considerations apply to intentional systems.

This may seem too fast. After all, if a Russell world came into existence its future would be (up to indeterminacy) indistinguishable from an identical world which arrived at the same total state by ordinary pathways. In the Russell world, all that is required to maintain confidence in the currency is that we distinguish some 20$NOTEs as genuine, although of course none of them will be. So, it seems, what's relevant is not actual genuineness, but only as-if or perceived genuineness.

The objection here is too strong. First, it would rule out many other properties as causally relevant. For example, on similar reasoning, smallpox vaccination would be causally irrelevant to the prevention of smallpox-as long as each person came into being as if vaccinated, each would be protected against smallpox. This example points out a second factor. Clearly, as the Russell world ages, people born into it will need to be vaccinated to receive protection against smallpox. So even though as-if vaccination is as good as vaccination in the short run, in the long run vaccination will be causally relevant. Likewise for 20$NOTEs.




Although as-if genuineness is sufficient for confidence in the currency to begin with, the genuineness of newly produced 20$NOTEs will matter in the long run.

7 Conclusions

The causal-irrelevance argument applied to intentional properties lacks a premise connecting the weaker possibility (that some brain states should have some particular behavioral effect while lacking the intentional property in question) to the stronger possibility (that all those brain states should have the same behavioral effects while lacking the given intentional property). This premise could, I believe, only be supplied by empirical investigation, and it has not, as yet, been supplied. So, the argument does not provide a convincing demonstration that intentional properties are causally irrelevant to behavior.

Epiphenomenalism is normally understood to entail the complete causal inertness of mental properties. The transcendental defense suggests, however, that we should consider the inertness of mental properties with respect to different events. The intentional properties of a given brain state may indeed turn out to be causally inert with respect to the direct behavioral effects of that brain state. If so, then a limited form of epiphenomenalism may indeed have been vindicated (perhaps enough epiphenomenalism to engender epiphobia). In this paper I have not tried either to rebut or support this kind of epiphenomenalism; the transcendental defense is quite compatible with it. (Dretske's own solution to the soprano problem resembles the transcendental defense in some respects; this may explain why Segal & Sober react to it as quoted in the introduction above.) It would, however, be an error of logic to mistake this limited kind of epiphenomenalism for the view that intentional properties lack any kind of causal significance, or that they have no role to play in science.

Notes

Acknowledgments The idea for this paper arose from discussions with Heather Gert about the necessary conditions for the existence of categories in different possible worlds, which results in a condition similar to (3) in footnote 2. Subsequent encouragement from, and discussions with, John Gibbons, Michael "Bubba" Hand, Ruth Millikan, and the participants at Rob Cummins' 1993 NEH summer seminar were very helpful. I thank David Braun, Rob Cummins, Jim Garson, Jon Kvanvig, Hugh McCann, and those who reviewed the manuscript, for taking the trouble to provide detailed comments on an ancestral version. They may be of the opinion that the semantic properties of their comments were irrelevant to the contents of this version, but if this is so, it is my fault.

'It may help to see the difference between these two claims expressed formally. Reading "CAUSAL(x)" to say x has certain effects on behavior, and the other predicates in the obvious ways, we can express this formally by saying that even if

(1) 3x[20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x)]&Vx[(20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x))-- O (20$NOTE(x) &CAUSAL(x)&-GENUINE(x))]

is true, (2) O (3x[20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x)]&Vx[(20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x))

--(20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x)&-GENUINE(x))]) may still be false. The existence claim 3x[20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x)] makes it clear that (1) and (2) are not satisfied by the mere absence of 20$NOTEs or things with the appropriate effects on behavior. 20$NOTE(x) and CAUSAL(x) appear in the consequent of the embedded conditional in (1) to make



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it clear that the asserted possibility is that 20$NOTEs with the given behavioral effects can have the same physical properties and effects on behavior yet lack genuineness. In (2), 20$NOTE(x) and CAUSAL(x) in the consequent are superfluous, but are included to parallel (1). The modal operators apply to what is nomologically possible (see section 6).

2The denial of (2) is (3) - K (3x[20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x)]&Vx[(20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x))--(20$NOTE(x)

&CAUSAL(x)&-GENUINE(x))]) which is equivalent to

(4) D(3x[20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x)]--3x[20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x)&-(20$NOTE(x) &CAUSAL(x)&-GENUINE(x))])

or, equivalently, (5) D(3x[20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x)]->3x[20$NOTE(x)&CAUSAL(x)&GENUINE(x))]).

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it isn't what you think: a new idea about intentional causation

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