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believes. Stalnaker argues for deep contextualism about content. This theme is further elaborated in Chapter 6, which discusses the slow switching variant of Twin Earth cases. A short final chapter provides a brief, general characterization of the whole project in the light of the preceding discussions. As this brief description of the book reveals, Stalnaker discusses a veritable rogues gallery of recent philosophy: Mary and the issue of phenomenal knowledge; Lauben, Lingens, Sleeping Beauty, Lewiss dual gods and self-locating beliefs; Pierre, Ortcutt and the problems of singular belief; and Twin Earthers and the problem of reconciling externalism and knowledge of ones own beliefs. Stalnaker is a brilliant and important philosopher and he does not fail to provide here a plethora of provocative and illuminating discussions of many of these themes. My chief criticism of the book as a whole is that, no doubt owing both to its having originated in a series of lectures and to its brevity (it is published as part of Oxfords Lines of Thought: Short Philosophical Books series), it, often frustratingly, falls between being, on the one hand, a series of self-contained, if mutually complementary, essays on a variety of related themes and, on the other hand, a through-composed monographic presentation of a theory or world view. The sense that the book is striving for a unified presentation against its own tendency to want to say lots of things about lots of on-going debates, coupled with the fact that Stalnaker is not easy to read and takes for granted a great familiarity with the philosophical context, makes this a very difficult book. Certainly, not all books need be for everyone, and there is nothing wrong with writing for ones peers (those already deeply involved in these debates) rather than an audience of general philosophers (almost no original philosophy seeks to go beyond this audience these days). But there will be many readers who are interested enough in one or other of the issues discussed, and admire Stalnaker enough to want to know what he has to say about them, that the book would have benefitted, even at the expense of an increase in its length, from a little more help for the reader. SIMON EVNINE University of Miami Coral Gables, FL 33124-4670, USA sevnine@miami.edu

Downloaded from http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Leeds on October 20, 2013

Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will

By ALFRED R. MELE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009.
X

+ 178

PP.

30.00

Some people, most notably Daniel Wegner (Wegner 2002) and Benjamin Libet (Libet et al. 1983; Libet 2004), have held that empirical evidence from neurophysiology and psychology can show that we are under an illusion in supposing our actions result from decisions we have taken and intentions we have formed. In this book, Mele examines the challenge posed by such evidence, arguing that the data do not support the claims of such illusion theorists and that instead there is convincing evidence for the causal efficacy of conscious intentions.

Analysis Reviews Vol 70 | Number 2 | April 2010 | pp. 395398 doi:10.1093/analys/anq013 The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

396 | book reviews

On a topic like this, one might hope to see the benefits of interdisciplinary cooperation. Mele himself clearly shares this hope, pointing out that since philosophers can access scientific evidence and scientists can follow philosophical arguments, we should be able to achieve a mutually enriching exchange. Unfortunately, there seem to be major obstacles. Mele himself warns that an attitude of dismissiveness is a mistake, on either side (2); and this monograph is exemplary in avoiding the pitfall of dismissiveness. Worries remain, however, about what each side can usefully contribute. A philosophers worry about the psychologists concerns the motivation behind illusion theory. Is this advocated because it is thought that the main issue about the mind is whether we should be dualists or epiphenomenalists? Or perhaps, the reason for these claims has less to do with na ve views in the philosophy of mind and more to do with the need to sex up the impact of ones research in a struggle to secure funding? But it is not for us to worry about the motives of illusion theorists. Our primary concern should be with what philosophers can contribute. Meles answer is: conceptual precision. Mele himself a very good philosopher, abreast of relevant empirical evidence, who can even draw on first-hand experience as a participant in a Libet-style trial (3435) should be exceptionally well equipped to supply this. But his strategy is really quite puzzling. Mele subordinates the philosophical task of conceptual analysis to the aim of considering whether a particular hypothesis, which he labels H, can be upheld in the face of the allegedly challenging evidence: H. Whenever human beings perform an overt intentional action, at least one of the following plays a causal role in its production: some intention of theirs; the acquisition or persistence of some intention of theirs; the physical correlate of one or more of the preceding items. (11) He is well aware that H is a stronger thesis than he needs to uphold: intentions could sometimes cause actions without being involved in the production of every intentional action. So, if the evidence marshalled by illusion theorists fails to bring H into question, it might seem that their case must be very flimsy. Yet, there is something peculiar about this strategy. The folk seem far from committed to a belief in anything like H, the view that particular intentional actions are always produced by some intention so to act. The evidence for the Knobe side-effect effect (Knobe 2003) seems to indicate that we are prepared to regard an unintended consequence as something the agent brought about intentionally, provided that the consequence is both foreseen and sufficiently bad. But let this pass for the moment. One might think it can do no harm to see the illusionists falter, even against an overly strong claim for the causal role of intentions. Mele starts to provide conceptual precision by making a number of distinctions concerning intentions in his first chapter. He distinguishes standing intentions from occurrent intentions. Standing intentions are intentions formed in the past which continue to influence conduct. Mele puts these to one side (whatever their general importance to folk psychology), since the psychological trials he is going to discuss attempt to investigate the efficacy of occurrent intentions. Among occurrent intentions, he distinguishes between proximal, distal and mixed. A proximal occurrent intention is an intention to do something right now, a distal intention is to do something in the future and a mixed intention is to do something which takes some time, starting now.

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Armed with this arsenal of distinctions, he is ready to tackle the results of Libets famous experiment, in which participants wired for EEG are asked to flex their wrist or fingers, while noting the clock time at which they first become aware of a decision or intention to flex. The allegedly challenging result is that EEG readings showed a change, a shift in readiness potentials (RP-shift), which reliably preceded flexings and also preceded the reported time of a decision or intention to flex by some 350 ms. The illusionist interpretation is that the RP-shift is the brain event thats triggers action, subjective awareness of an intention being a mere echo of the workings of the neural mechanism. Mele quite reasonably argues against this that it is much more likely that what emerges around 550 ms [the time of the RP-shift] is a potential cause of a proximal intention or decision than a proximal intention or decision itself (51). But are the distinctions that Mele draws really helpful? I would suggest that we might do better to pay attention to two general issues: first, the viability of causal exclusion arguments; and secondly, the question whether folk psychology has any clear place for proximal occurrent intentions. The illusionists use of the results of the Libet experiment is an attempted causal exclusion argument. We should ask why there is so much as a prima facie case for thinking that because flexings can be predicted from RP-shifts, it is those events, to the exclusion of agents conscious intentions, which are causing the wrist or finger flexings. Eating by diners in a restaurant is reliably predictable from food being placed in front of them by waiters. Does that show that decisions by diners play no real causal role in actions of eating? The analogy may be rough and imperfect, though one could pursue it in the case of the vetoing experiments that Mele describes rather like the food being left untouched after all. Yet the suggestion that it is the brain, rather than the person, making decisions seems so crudely epiphenomenalist. Mele attempts fine-grained engagement by considering how to identify the proximal occurrent intention. However, it is not clear that his attempted precision in this regard is well-directed. Do we have such things as occurrent intentions to flex our fingers? For no particular reason beyond complying with instructions in a trial? The natural place for intentions within folk psychology is surely within some exercise of practical reasoning. But this sort of trivial action, not seen as a means to any further end, gives little or nothing to reason about. So, it is not clear that the distinctions Mele deploys help to illuminate the issue. Certainly, concentrating on occurrent intentions to the exclusion of standing intentions might be misleading. Thus, there is a very natural explanation of the Knobe effect in terms of standing intentions. The CEO of a company who introduces a policy, which boosts profits but damages the environment, damages the environment intentionally because his standing intention is that boosting his companys profits should override other considerations. Another respect in which Meles discussion of intentions might be questioned concerns the issue whether intentions have to be conscious. Wegner thinks they must be. Against this, Mele says (25) that he is going to argue that an agent can have, at time t, an occurrent intention to A without being aware at t that he intends to A. At the end of the chapter, he tells us that he has motivated the thesis . . . that not all proximal intentions are conscious intentions (44). But I cannot see that he has presented any argument for some intentions not being conscious, unless this is supplied by the cases,

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on p. 39 of various things done intentionally but without an immediately preceding conscious intention. Yet, it is by no means obviously correct to postulate an occurrent intention in many of these cases in which someone acts intentionally. Suppose some intention to be conscious, there may still remain a question as to whether its being conscious is a causally efficacious factor. At least I think this question remains, although if intentions have to be conscious there would seem to be no counterfactual foil, in which the intention would still have brought about the action without being conscious. In his penultimate chapter (Ch. 7), Mele attempts to produce empirical evidence for the effectiveness of conscious intentions. Without any clear-cut contrast with non-conscious intentions, evidence which unequivocally speaks in favour of this conclusion is going to be hard to come by. Mele appeals to trials involving implementation intentions (13444). Getting participants to form such implementation intentions greatly increases the probability that an intention will be carried through. But that seems to have more to do with publicizing an intention or working out in some detail what is required to carry it out, rather than the mere fact of the intention being conscious. This book is the first careful and sustained examination of the issue of the efficacy of conscious intentions and decisions. As such it already qualifies as required reading in the philosophy of psychology. However, you may find Meles strategy almost as puzzling as the issue he attempts to resolve. GEORGE BOTTERILL University of Sheffield, 45 Victoria Street, Sheffield S3 7QB, UK g.botterill@sheffield.ac.uk

References
Knobe, J. 2003. Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis 63: 19093. Libet, B. 2004. Mind Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Libet, B., C. Gleason, E. Wright and D. Pearl. 1983. Time of unconscious intention to act, in relation to onset of cerebral activity (Readiness-Potential). Brain 106: 62342. Wegner, D. 2002. The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Human Enhancement
EDITED
BY

JULIAN SAVULESCU

AND

NICK BOSTROM
VIII + 422 PP.

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009.

35.00

This book on the bioethics of human enhancement contains an Introduction by the editors on the state of the debate; 10 chapters on human enhancement in general; seven chapters on specific enhancements; and a coda chapter on practical challenges to enhancement. The line-up of authors is impressive and includes a number of leading bioethicists. The editors are well known for their transhumanist views grounded in a

Analysis Reviews Vol 70 | Number 402 | April 2010 | pp. 398401 doi:10.1093/analys/anq011 The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org