The Importance of Being Understood ‘A very enjoyable and provocative book on an important topic, in Morton’s inimitable style.’ Peter Goldie, King’s College London ‘A very valuable addition to the literature. Morton brings together material from game theory, philosophy and psychology in genuinely new and illumi- nating ways.’ Gregory Currie, University of Nottingham The Importance of Being Understood is an innovative and thought-provoking exploration of the links between the way we think about each other’s mental states and the fundamentally cooperative nature of everyday life. Adam Morton begins with a consideration of ‘folk psychology’, the ten- dency to attribute emotions, desires, beliefs and thoughts to human minds. He takes the view that it is precisely this tendency that enables us to understand, predict and explain the actions of others, which in turn helps us to decide on our own course of action. This reflection suggests, claims Morton, that certain types of cooperative activity are dependent on everyday psychological under- standing and, conversely, that we act in such a way as to make our actions easily intelligible to others so that we can benefit from being understood. Using examples of cooperative activities such as car driving and playing tennis, Adam Morton analyses the concepts of belief and simulation, the idea of explanation by motive and the causal force of psychological explanation. In addition to argument and analysis, Morton also includes more speculative explorations of topics such as moral progress, and presents a new point of view on how and why cultures differ. The Importance of Being Understood forges new links between ethics and the philosophy of mind, and will be of interest to anyone in either field, as well as to developmental psychologists. Adam Morton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. He is author of Frames of Mind (1980), Disasters and Dilemmas (1990), Philoso- phy in Practice (1996) and A Guide Through the Theory of Knowledge (1997). International Library of Philosophy Edited by José Luis Bermúdez,Tim Crane and Peter Sullivan Advisory Board: Jonathan Barnes, Fred Dretske, Frances Kamm, Brian Leiter, Huw Price and Sydney Shoemaker Recent titles in the ILP: The Facts of Causation D. H. Mellor The Conceptual Roots of Mathematics J. R. Lucas Stream of Consciousness Barry Dainton Knowledge and Reference in Empirical Science Jody Azzouni Reason Without Freedom David Owens The Price of Doubt N. M. L. Nathan Matters of Mind Scott Sturgeon Logic, Form and Grammar Peter Long The Metaphysicians of Meaning Gideon Makin Logical Investigations,Vols I & II Edmund Husserl Truth Without Objectivity Max Kölbel Departing from Frege Mark Sainsbury The Importance of Being Understood Adam Morton The Importance of Being Understood Folk psychology as ethics Adam Morton First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York,NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2003 Adam Morton All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-99493-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0–415–27242–4 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–27243–2 (pbk) Contents Foreword: where we’re going vii 1 Microethics 1 Appendix: preferences from choices 28 2 Motives and virtues 34 3 Belief and coordination 55 4 Explanatory contrast and causal depth 81 Appendix: attractors and contrasts 107 5 Learning to simulate 116 Appendix: maximization and complexity 141 Summary: where we’ve got to 148 Exploration I Attribution biases and the statistics of cooperation 151 Exploration II Interspection and expression 161 Exploration III Ethos 175 Exploration IV Moral progress 187 Notes 206 Bibliography 211 Index 222 Foreword Where we’re going The central idea of this book should be intuitively to attract anyone who has driven in Rome, Paris, or Manhattan. You can rarely predict what any other driver is going to do. To that extent all folk psychology and all social con- tracts are useless. What you can do is notice what outcomes everyone would rather avoid, and then cautiously and very visibly to act in a way that makes those outcomes less likely. When you do, then often enough you create a situ- ation in which the other drivers are constrained by their own interest (in not having their clean cars dented or bloodstained) to go along with that course of action. When you make yourself intelligible you gain a predictive hold over the behavior of others. We are a mind-attributing species. We very readily think of one another in terms of emotions, desires, beliefs, thinking. We are also a cooperative species. Human life has always required that we share projects and work together, doing our best to avoid the possibilities for exploitation that this presents. This is the not inherently very promising niche that humans have chosen and flourished in, that of social animals whose sociality is flexible because of its relative poverty of innate social routines. It is a not very daring suggestion that these two characteristics are linked. One important reason for attributing states of mind is to generate the expec- tations that make cooperation possible and allow us to anticipate and forestall exploitation, fake cooperation or cheating. We do not usually explain one another’s actions out of pure scientific curiosity: there are reasons why we want to know why people act as they do, and these are generally practical social reasons. In this way folk psychology, the body of knowledge, opinions and routines that we use in conceptualizing and anticipating one another’s actions, functions as a background to cooperative activity. Indeed one might take it as a background to ethics, taken very broadly as the enterprise of helping one another to the best lives. (Whether or not rights, duties and obli- gations are actors in this particular story.) The aim of this book is to explore one family of connections between mind-ascription and cooperative activity. I explore a variety of ways in which the everyday explanation or prediction of actions is aided by the fact that the viii Foreword person whose actions are explained shares the routines of explanation or pre- diction in question. When this is the case then the presence of the routine is one of the reasons for the behavior that it explains, and this will rarely occur unless the behavior is shaped in a direction that tends towards mutually prof- itable interaction. Or, more generally, the presence in a culture of ways of understanding action can create a situation in which patterns of shared action are encouraged, which themselves help make the understanding appropriate. Beneficial circularities. And in the course of looking for exam- ples of these phenomena I investigate more general interdependencies of modes of everyday psychological understanding and types of cooperative activity. There is a big central idea here. We make ourselves intelligible, in order to have the benefits of being understood. It should not be exaggerated, though. I am not claiming that the function of facilitating cooperative activity by itself creates or determines any easily-named aspect of folk psychology. The thread that I am following runs through much of the fabric of everyday understanding, but it may not bear the full weight at any point. As a result, my exposition consists of analyses of a number of topics – explanation by motive, the concept of belief, the causal force of psychological explanation, simulation – in which I argue for claims from which conclusions relevant to my themes follow. I am sure that the thread extends further than I have traced it. And I can give reasons for suspecting or conjecturing that it is found in several places where I do not have definite arguments for its presence. I don’t think that phi- losophy should consist only of definite arguments for clear conclusions, though. We also need suggestive considerations that let us see possibilities that we can then slowly try to deal with. Every philosopher strikes the balance between ‘clearly true but possibly boring’ and ‘clearly interesting but possibly false’ in a different way. My strategy is to include both, but to label them as such. So the form of this book is that after five chapters in which argument and analysis are taken as far as I can take them, there is a conclusion. And then there are four shorter items, which I do not call chapters but explo- rations, which make suggestions about how the points I have made could be pushed rather further. They are speculative, and they help themselves to premises where they need to. Some readers may find some of them more inter- esting than the more careful chapters that precede them. But others may prefer to ignore them. You can decide which type of reader you are. Writing this book has had an effect on my attitude to other people. When I began it I thought of people primarily as bearers of individual beliefs and desires, who have to negotiate their way around one another to get what they want.