1.1 – Economics and Philosophy in the work of Sen on rationality

6The criticisms Sen has addressed to the standard conception of rationality in economics target both the a priori impositions of internal consistency of choice conditions on choice-functions in revealed preference theories and the broadening of self-interested motives in preference-based utility functions. Sen has pointed out that both approaches are in fact intertwined around the notion of utility so that the interpretations of choice behaviors in economics amount “to get an empirical rabbit out of a definitional hat” [2002b: 27]. For Sen, the conception of rationality as internal consistency of choice makes no sense without any external reference to behavior because, without such external reference, it implicitly underlies that rational agents only act self-interestedly, which is a psychological motive that the consistency of choice approach sought to eradicate (see esp. Sen [1973; 1987; 2002b]). In normative economics, where rationality is understood in terms of choices that are equated with welfare maximization, the intertwinement of consistency of choice with self-interest poses rather dangerous problems: not only it biases observations of actual behaviors as all being guided solely by the pursuit of individual welfare maximization, but it also biases normative policy recommendations by interpreting welfare criteria such as Pareto optimality as being attainable only through self-interested behavior (see esp. Sen [1987]).

7The burden of responsibility for this state of affairs is, Sen argues, carried by both (1) the lack of analytical clarity on the relationships between the concept of preference and the concepts of choice, utility maximization, motive and welfare, and (2) the relationships between what he calls the “direct” and the “indirect” purposes of rational choice theory (RCT) in economics [Sen, 1987: 11–12]. On Sen’s account, the current state of affairs is that the direct purpose of RCT is used for characterizing the substance of rationality (i.e., the constraints for a choice to be rational, such as consistency conditions or self-interest maximization): it should help us to “think and act wisely and judiciously, rather than stupidly or impulsively” [Sen, 2002b: 42]. The indirect purpose of RCT is to describe and predict actual behavior, by first characterizing the substance of rationality (i.e., the direct purpose), “and then assuming that actual behavior will coincide with rational behavior” [Sen, 2007: 20–21]. He observes that, in economics, “[t]he two uses – directly normative and indirectly predictive – are closely linked. Indeed, the latter is basically parasitic on the former, but not vice versa.” [Sen, 2002b: 43]

8Sen departs from this view by turning it upside down so to speak: he develops the normative direct purpose of RCT from its positive indirect purpose. In other words, he theorizes the substance of rationality with insights obtained from actual behaviors. He does so through interdisciplinary exchanges with ethics, moral and political philosophy, to provide insights on the plurality of motives underlying individual choices and on alternative welfare criteria (see esp. Runciman and Sen [1965]; Sen [1974; 1987]). [5] This research strategy led Sen to criticize the traditional positive/normative dichotomy in economics. He argues that an explicit account of the value judgments that are at play in actual individual decision making could not only improve normative economics regarding welfare criteria, but also improve the substance of rationality in positive economics. His position in economics has been conjointly developed with respect to the broader philosophical problem of the fact/value dichotomy by himself and other philosophers (see Putnam [2002], Sen [2005], and the volume edited by Putnam and Walsh [2012]). Roughly speaking, Sen takes the following methodological stance in ethics, political and moral philosophy: he retains the need of public reasoning (or public deliberation) emphasized by Rawls and other transcendental approaches to justice, but rejects their methodological use of a priori concepts such as the veil of ignorance, for a more comparative and empirically grounded approach to justice [Sen, 1980; 2006; 2009]. [6] Of importance here is the intrinsically social dimension it gives to his approach: ethical and moral norms of behavior are to be found ‘out there’ so to speak, by scrutinizing the “triple entanglement: of fact, convention and value” [Sen, 2005: 112] in society to provide relevant information for understanding these norms, and, by implication, human rationality. [7]

1.2 – Context-dependency of preferences in the work of Sen

9Sen’s work in ethics, moral and political philosophy provides him the material for formal and axiomatic contributions to the direct purpose of RCT in economics to fight against “[t]he authoritarianism of some context-independent axioms” [Sen, 2002b: 6] of preferences underlying both the rationalization of choice functions and the enlightening of self-interest in the maximization of utility function. One line of conceptual contribution developed by Sen consists in analytical inquiries into the nature of external references to behaviors that can rationalize choice behaviors which contradict either the most basic internal consistency of choice conditions or the broadest ‘enlightenment’ of self-interest maximization. [8]

10I would like to emphasize a key methodological element in this line of contributions, namely: the “‘comprehensive’ description of choice processes and outcomes” [Sen, 2002f: 159; my emphasis] from which Sen derives formal and conceptual contributions to RCT. These contributions start from the premise that preferences underlying choices “over comprehensive outcomes (including the choice process) have to be distinguished from the conditional preferences over culmination outcomes given the acts of choice” [Sen, 2002f: 159], where culmination outcomes basically refer to the standard consequentialist view of the relationships between preferences, choices and outcomes (i.e., either chosen outcomes are identified with preferences or preferred outcomes are identified with choices). Comprehensive outcomes and comprehensive choice processes are descriptions of choice behaviors violating the prima facie reasonableness of either the weakest internal consistency of choice conditions or the broadest ‘enlightened’ self-interest maximization. It is from these descriptions that external references to behaviors that rationalize choice behaviors are extracted and formalized.

11To illustrate the comprehensive description of choice processes and outcomes, let’s start by considering the following thought experiment (that is inspired by comprehensive descriptions given by Sen [2002a; 2002f] and extended in order to illustrate more of his conceptual apparatus at once in the analysis that follows):

12

Imagine a fictional character named Mike, who is at a dinner guest party where there is a plate that, once, was full of apples. At one point, Mike feels like eating an apple. When Mike reaches for the plate there is only one remaining apple so that he has the choice between ‘taking the last’ apple and ‘taking nothing’. Mike knows for a fact that (a) if there had been two apples he would have picked one, as he in fact did the day before at the same kind of dinner guest party facing the exact same choice situation but with one extra apple in the plate, or that (b) if someone else, say, the host, handled him the last apple, he would have accepted the offer, as it also indeed happened the day before, after Mike ate his first apple. But because (c) there is just one apple left and that nobody handles it to him, he prefers to take nothing. Just as he reached this decision, the drunkest guest of the party sees that Mike is fixing the last apple, understands what is going on in Mike’s head, approaches Mike and (d) jokingly yells across the room “to hell with good manners” while handling the last apple to Mike: ashamed, Mike declines the offer and responds by pretending that he was absolutely not thinking about that.

13In this story, Mike faces four choice situations (a) two apples in a plate, (b) the last apple handled by the host, (c) the last apple in a plate, and (d) the last apple handled by the yelling drunkest guest. If we give up on the comprehensive description, the culmination outcomes collapse into the two choice menus: {‘apple’; ‘apple’; ‘nothing’} for situation a, and {‘apple’; ‘nothing’} for situations b, c and d. According to internal consistency of choice approaches to revealed preference, Mike’s choice behavior is consistent (hence Mike is rational) between situations a and b, and between situations c and d, but Mike’s choice behavior is generally inconsistent (hence Mike is irrational) across the four situations: his revealed preferences violate every weak internal consistency of choice condition referenced by Sen [2002a; 2002f]. But all the same, given the comprehensive description Mike cannot be deemed irrational since there are reasons to explain his choice behavior in every situations. The variety and multiplicity of such reasons can be very wide. Sen [2002a; 2002f] considers non-exhaustive lists of non-mutually exclusive reasons, which can be separated into two broad groups. On the one hand, there can be reasons that imply an external reference to behaviors related to the identity of the chooser [Sen, 2002f: 161–162):

1. “Reputation and indirect effects”: e.g., Mike wants to have an ‘apple lover’ reputation in situation a, a ‘good guest’ reputation in situation b, to avoid an ‘apple grabber’ reputation in situation c, to avoid being associated with the drunkest guest and/or the reputation of being a person that cares too much about other people judgments in situation d.
2. “Social commitment and moral imperatives”: e.g., Mike could have an implicit or explicit self-imposed ethics of never taking himself the last apple whatsoever in situation c.
3. “Direct welfare effects”: e.g., Mike might genuinely enjoy the eating of an apple in situations a and b, and by sympathy, also genuinely enjoy that someone else will benefit from the last apple in situations a and c.
4. “Conventional rule following”: e.g., Mike is following rules of ‘proper dinner guest party behavior’ in situation a, b, c and d.

5. “Positional choice”: e.g., the culmination outcome ‘apple’ is comprehensively not the same when there is another ‘apple’ and ‘nothing’ in the choice menu, i.e., it is ‘another apple’ in situation a, as when there is just ‘nothing’ in the choice menu, i.e., it is ‘the last apple’ in situations b, c, and d.
6. “Epistemic value of the menu”: where one extra option in a choice menu brings information about the situation, including extra information about the other options of the menu. This type of reason does not fit our story very well; Sen usually illustrate these by the example of a person who “given the choice between having tea at a distant acquaintance’s home (x), and not going there (y) […] chooses to have tea (x), [but] nevertheless choose to go away (y), if offered – by that acquaintance – a choice over having tea (x) going away (y), and having some cocaine (z). The menu offered may provide information about the situation” [Sen, 2002a: 130–131].
7. “Freedom to reject”: when a choice is made not for the sake of the chosen culmination outcome, but rather for the sake of comprehensively rejecting the other outcomes of the choice menu. This type of reason also does not fit out story very well; Sen [ibid.] illustrates this as follow: “The point of fasting in the form of not eating (y), given the possibility of eating well (z), may become less clear when the only alternative is to be partly famished anyway (x).”

14

“[consistency conditions] have cutting power only when “the same” alternative can be picked from different sets – precisely what is ruled out by this recharacterization.”

15In order to get some form of parsimonious analytical tractability concerning these different types of external references to behaviors Sen has proposed the formalization of “parametric dependence” of preferences on the chooser (e.g., Mike, the host or the drunkest guest), on the menu (e.g., one or two apples), and on their interactions [2002f: 167–168 [9]] by indexing preference relations (not the options in the menus) on two parameters (identity of the chooser, and choice sets). He has also discussed broader cases of “background dependency” of preferences where preference relations are indexed on a set which may or may not intercept with the set of choice menus [Sen, 2002d (1992)]. This latter type of formalization has been, however, much less investigated by Sen as compared to the two (chooser and menu dependencies) former ones.

1.3 – Economics and Philosophy in the work of Sen on context-dependent preferences

16It is important to stress that, for Sen, the parametric dependence of preferences on external reference to behaviors are guided by the epistemological goal of broadening the mathematical discipline of maximization for economics, where it “has often paralleled the modeling of maximization in physics and related discipline,” [Sen, 2002f: 159] in which:

17

“[S]ince no volitional choice is involved (we presume)… maximization typically occurs without a deliberate “maximizer.” … But maximizing behavior differs from nonvolitional maximization because of the fundamental relevance of the choice act, which has to be placed in a central position in analyzing maximizing behavior.”

18Furthermore, Sen’s formal apparatus for comprehensive maximization in economics (partly) illustrated here is codependent both with his work in normative economics where he draws policy recommendations from this apparatus and with his work in ethics, moral and political philosophy, where the substance of reasons and their consistency for choices is much more discussed than it is in his work in economics. Sen labels his broad conception of rationality “reasoned scrutiny” [2002b; 2009] which imposes only non-formal constraints on choices to be considered as rational. These constraints are, roughly speaking, that the reasons (including among others (1)-(7) above) individuals hold for their choices (a) have to survive thorough reflexive scrutiny from the individuals themselves [Sen, 2002b], and (b) are able to enter reasoned public scrutiny, not necessarily for being universally adopted, but at least for being reasonably discussed [Sen, 2009].

19The Senian literature on external reference brings undeniable contributions to our analytical and epistemological understanding of rational choices and the related practical implications. When, four decades ago, Sen started to urge economists to broaden the scope of information relevant to the theorizing of individual rationality beyond choices, he claimed that the behaviorist stance of RCT has “on one hand,… overstate[d] the difficulties of introspection… and on the other,… underestimate[d] the problems of studying preferences.” [Sen, 1973: 258] The developing literature on the axiomatics of external reference to behaviors is a manifestation that Sen’s concerns on the study of preferences have been taken seriously (see the referenced literature in Bossert and Suzumura [2011], and in Bhattacharyya et. al. [2011]). Sen’s use of introspection in his thought experiments has been an important methodological aspect of his critical work on rationality to attack economists’ dogmatism on the avoidance of “the peep into the head of the consumer.” [Sen, 1973: 243]

20The next section tries to make further developments to Sen’s peep into individuals’ heads, by illustrating how an interdisciplinary discussion between the Senian literature on external references to behavior and John Searle’s philosophy of mind, especially his account of intentionality, provides an ontological understanding of what is going on in individuals’ heads that corresponds to these external references to behaviors, which, in turn, suggests further insights for analytical and epistemological contributions to this literature.

2.1 – Epistemology and ontology, subjectivity and objectivity

21A crucial point in Searle’s philosophy of mind is his articulation of the relationships between epistemology, ontology, objectivity and subjectivity. He often stresses that usually, in analytic philosophy, the notions of “objectivity” and “subjectivity” are solely used in their epistemological senses:

22

“We often speak of judgments as being “subjective” when we mean that their truth or falsity is not a simple matter of fact, but depends on certain attitudes, feelings, and points of view of the makers and the hearers of the judgment. An example of such a judgment might be “Van Gogh is a better artist than Matisse”. In this sense of “subjectivity”, we contrast such subjective judgments with completely objective judgments, such as “Matisse lived in Nice during the year 1917.” For such objective judgments, we can ascertain what sorts of facts in the world make them true or false independent of anybody’s attitudes or feelings about them.”

23This traditional sense of the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is purely epistemological, and “the third-person character of the epistemology should not blind us to the fact that the actual ontology of mental states is a first-person ontology” [Searle, 1992: 16]. To be clear, on Searle’s account, the (traditional) epistemological sense of the (traditional) distinction between objectivity and subjectivity concerns the status of claims about features of the world: if they have truth conditions which are only matters of objective judgments in that they refer to facts of the world, they are epistemologically objective claims, if their truth conditions also refers to “attitudes, feelings and points of view of the makers and the hearer of the judgment” they are epistemologically subjective claims.

24For Searle, besides the epistemological sense of the distinction (which he accepts), it is important to be clear on the ontological sense of the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, which lies on the mode of existence of features of the world. Ontologically objective features of the world have an existence that is independent of human beings’ thoughts and actions: trees, mountains, oceans, planets, apples and humans physical bodies;

25

“[a]ll of these are observer independent in the sense that their existence does not depend on human attitudes.”

26Ontologically subjective features of the world have an existence that is dependent on human beings’ thoughts and actions: (un)conscious / mental / intentional states, words, dinner guest parties, unicorns,

27

“[m]oney, property, government, football games, and cocktail parties are what they are, in large part, because that’s what we think they are. All of these are observer relative or observer dependent.”

28The key point here is that ontologically subjective features of the world can be studied from an epistemologically objective point of view. In other words, it is an epistemologically objective fact that there are such things as intentional states, words, dinner guest parties, and individuals engaging in introspective deliberations to undertake rational actions.

29A first step in the clarification of the ontological structure of Sen’s conceptual apparatus is that chooser-dependency of preferences will usually make external references to features of the world that are ontologically subjective, from which further ontologically subjective reasons can be derived, e.g., the host’s identity at a dinner guest party is defined by a set of observer-dependent social and institutional rules, from which Mike can derive his reasons for his choices. Menu-dependency of preferences will, for their parts, usually make external references to features of the world that are ontologically objective from which ontologically subjective reasons can be derived, e.g., it is an observer-independent fact that there is one apple in a plate, from which Mike can derive an ontologically subjective reason for not taking the last apple from the plate.

30I said ‘usually’ in the previous paragraph because there can be cases of chooser-dependency of preferences that make external references to ontologically objective features related to the physical position of the chooser (Mike can see a worm in one apple from one perspective and not from another one, and subsequently derive different reasons for not picking or picking the apple). Similarly, there can be cases of menu-dependency of preferences that makes external references to ontologically subjective features of the world related to the social constitution of the menus (if Mike has to fill out a form for choosing or not choosing an apple, the way the form is presented and written is an ontologically subjective feature of the world). However, these cases are epistemologically ruled out in the Senian literature on external references to behaviors (where the physical position of the chooser and the social constitution of the menus are not considered as relevant choice information) and in economics (where the identity of the chooser along with his physical position and the relative contents of intercepting menus along with their social constitutions are not considered as relevant choice information).

31The interplay between objectivity and subjectivity is also an important point for Sen in his philosophical writings on “positional objectivity” – from which the parametric dependence of preferences is inspired – where he claims that:

32

“[E]xcluding special mental tendencies…would go against the general approach of seeing objectivity in positional terms…, it might well be useful to see a phenomenon that has clearly subjective features as being also positionally objective…since this would then help us to focus on causal links that have important explanatory roles.”

33Although he also claims that

34

“subjectivity and positional objectivity do, in general, remain different; the possibility of overlap does not undermine this basic distinction.”

35Hence, both the Senian literature on external reference to behaviors and Searle’s philosophy of mind aim at giving epistemologically objective accounts of ontologically subjective features of the world. I claim that the “causal links that have important explanatory roles” that Sen is speculating about can be developed through Searle’s account of intentionality, in a way that clarifies the overlapping between objectivity and subjectivity in the Senian accounts of context-dependent preferences, and in the way that suggests what epistemologically objective constraints could be put on rationality to complement Sen’s requirements of reasoned self-scrutiny. [10]

2.2 – The intentionality of apple-choice behaviors

36Searle’s account of intentionality sticks with the traditional distinction between: on the one hand, cognitive intentional states, such as beliefs, that are the basis of theoretical reason (or ‘pure reason’ in Kantian terms) dealing with the question ‘How do we know? (and what can we know?)’; and on the other hand, volitional intentional states, such as desires and preferences, that are at the basis of practical reason which deals with the question ‘How do we act?’. Searle’s account of intentionality provides a conceptual apparatus which explains the nature of different intentional states and the relationships among them. It is perhaps more convenient for the reader to have the following table from start, which contains a (non-exhaustive) taxonomy of intentional states and some important Searlean concepts that will be presented and illustrated.

37Let’s first notice that standard approaches in the philosophy of action, as well as the implicit account of intentionality in RCT and economics (along with the Senian literature on external references) take beliefs (probabilistic or perfect knowledge of outcomes) and desires (given or construed preferences relations on outcomes) to be the basic explanatory mental states for rational actions and decisions: usually, beliefs and desires combine to form an intention for an action. However, in Searle’s account:

38

“Beliefs and desires are not the primary forms, rather they are etiolated forms of more primordial experiences in perceiving and doing. Intention, for example, is not a fancy form of desire; it would be more accurate to think of desire as a faded form of intention, intention with the Intentional causation bleached out.”

39In other words, the major departure from Searle lies on the fact he turns the traditional explanatory scheme upside down so to speak, by considering, more basic, biological, intentional states such as perception and intention as playing a key role in the explanation of beliefs, desires and actions. Therefore, in what follows I will emphasize the contrasts between the Searlean explanatory roles of beliefs / desires and perceptions / intentions since, one could argue, it is there that lies the major implications for the use of RCT in economics including the Senian literature on external references to behaviors.

40The starting point of the Searlean conceptual apparatus for Intentionality is the conceptualization of intentional states as being composed of two parts: on the one hand, their psychological mode (e.g., perception, belief, intention, desires etc.), and, on the other hand, their intentional contents (e.g., apples in a plate, taking an apple, eating an apple, etc.). The distinction is important because it is possible to be in the same psychological mode but with different intentional contents, and hence be in different intentional states (e.g., perceiving or believing or desiring that there are apples in a plate).

41Then, the directedness of intentional states, on Searle’s account, hinges on the two ways they can relate to the world, or, in his terms, intentional states’ directions of fit. On the one hand, intentional states such as believing and perceiving have an intentional content in the mind of the individual that is supposed to fit how the world is (e.g., there are apples in a plate): they have a mind-to-world direction of fit that Searle symbolizes with a downward arrow ?. On the other hand, intentional states such as intending and desiring have to make the world change so that the world fits the intentional content that the individual has in mind (e.g. taking an apple): they have a world-to-mind direction of fit that Searle symbolizes with an upward arrow ?. [11] Then, Searle conceptualizes the conditions which make the direction of fit of an intentional state actually fit (or fail to fit) either the world or the mind in terms of conditions of satisfactions, which are determined by the intentional contents.

42We can illustrate the conceptual apparatus exposed so far by making explicit the belief and desire implicit in the examples discussed in the previous section using Searle’s formalization of intentional states S(p), where S stands for different psychological modes, and p stands for their respective propositional contents which represent the intentional contents and their conditions of satisfactions. [12] When Mike is believing (S) that ‘there is one apple in the plate’ (p), what makes the belief true (in his mind) is represented by the condition of satisfaction of this belief, namely that ‘there is one apple in the plate’ (in the world): his belief has a mind-to-world ? direction of fit, it can be satisfied only if it fits the world (i.e., what is in the ontologically objective plate), and his belief remains false if it does not (ontologically subjectively) change to fit the world. But when Mike is desiring (S) that ‘there are two apples in a plate’ (p), what makes the desire fulfilled (in the world) is represented by the condition of satisfaction of this desire, namely that ‘there are two apples in the plate’ (in his mind): his desire has a world-to-mind direction of fit ?, it can be satisfied only if the world fits the desire (i.e., what is ontologically subjectively in his mind), and his desire remains unfulfilled if the world does not (ontologically objectively) change to fit his desire. Under this account, beliefs and desires have conditions of satisfactions represented by their intentional contents.

43Here,

44

“the notion of representation…is just a shorthand for a constellation of independently motivated notions such as conditions of satisfaction, Intentional content, direction of fit, etc. … [s]tates such as belief or desire need not be conscious states [… since] a person can have a belief [e.g., that the earth is round] or a desire [e.g., to finish his ph.D dissertation] when he is not thinking about it and he can be truly said to have such states even when asleep.”

45Moreover,

46

“since all representation – whether done by the mind, language, pictures or anything else – is always under certain aspects and not others, the conditions of satisfaction are represented under certain aspects.”

47This means that Mike’s beliefs and desires have certain aspectual shapes that are not entirely captured by their propositional contents. Parts of these aspectual shapes could be made explicit by adding such precisions as ‘real apples as fruits and not as the decorative ones made out of plastic, etc.,’ but it is impossible to give an exhaustive explicit account of their aspectual shapes in their propositional contents. Furthermore, beliefs and desires can be about ontologically subjective objects that do not have any ontologically objective existence, e.g. Mike can believe that ‘rules of proper dinner guest party behavior preclude smashing apples onto a wall,’ as well as he can believe that ‘unicorns do not exist’ and he can desire to ‘follow rules of proper dinner guest party behavior’ as well as he can desire that ‘unicorns exist.’ Hence, as shown by their far reaching aspectual shapes and referring capacities, there are few ontological constraints on the intentional contents of beliefs and desires.

48According to Searle, more basic, biological, intentional states such as perceiving and intending have further constraints on their Intentionality due to their ontological specificity of being “Intentional and causal transaction[s] between mind and the world” [Searle, 1983: 49; my emphasis]. The causal feature of the transactions is that the direction of fit of these intentional states are caused (not just represented) by their intentional contents. Searle translates this ontological feature logically by making parts of these intentional states figure themselves into their own conditions of satisfaction: in Searle’s terms, basic, biological, intentional states are causally self-referential, they have a direction of causation from their conditions of satisfaction that cause their direction of fit to be in the opposite direction. We can illustrate this by making explicit the perception and intention implicit in our apple example. When Mike is perceiving (S) ‘one apple in a plate there’ (p), the conditions of satisfaction for his perception to be veridical (in his mind) are that: the fact that there (in the world) is one apple in a plate (and not something else) is causing his perceiving (in his mind) one apple in a plate there; his perception has a mind-to-world direction of fit ? (the ontologically subjective perception of the apple has to fit the ontologically objective apple in the world) which is caused by the world-to-mind direction of causation ? (the ontologically objective apple in the world has to cause the ontologically subjective perception of the apple) of the conditions of satisfaction (the ontologically objective existence of the apple); if something else is causing his perception of the apple, then the perception is not veridical (the conditions of satisfaction are not satisfied) whether or not there is one apple in a plate. When Mike is intending (S) ‘the action to pick one apple’ (p), the conditions of satisfaction for his intention to be carried out (in the world) are that: the fact that the action (in his mind) to pick one apple (and not something else) is causing his intending (in the world) the action to pick one apple; his intention has a world-to-mind ? direction of fit (the way he ontologically objectively intends to change the world has to fit the ontologically subjective action he has in mind) that is caused by the mind-to-world direction of causation ? (the action he ontologically subjectively has in mind cause the way he intends to ontologically objectively change the world) of the condition of satisfaction (the ontologically subjective action to pick one apple); if something else is causing his intention to pick one apple, the intention is not properly carried out (the conditions of satisfaction are not satisfied) whether or not he actually undertakes the action to pick one apple.

49Hence, on Searle’s account, the causal self-referentiality of perceptions and intentions puts ontological constraints on their intentional contents that do not exist for beliefs and desires. To put it crudely, perception and intention are about the things they are about because the things they are about have, respectively, ontologically objective (apple in the world) and subjective (action in the mind) existences of which the individual is directly aware: there cannot be satisfied unconscious perceptions and satisfied unconscious intentions as there can be satisfied unconscious beliefs and satisfied unconscious desires on Searle’s account of intentionality. To put it less crudely, the aspectual shapes of “perception[s] [are] fixed by the sheer physical features of the situation” [Searle, 1983: 50], while the aspectual shapes of intentions are fixed by the sheer mental features of the situation.

50Given that, as mentioned earlier, intentions are usually taken to be combinations of desires/preferences and beliefs/perfect-or-probabilistic-knowledge-of-outcomes in economics (implicitly), in decision theory and other theories of rational actions (explicitly), I will concentrate on the justifications of their specific ontological status in Searle’s account, while dropping here his parallel justifications for perceptions which are less relevant for the object of this paper.

51Searle stresses that intentions have two specificities compared to beliefs and desires: (1) they are the only volitional states that are causally self-referential: “[W]hereas there are lots of states of affairs which are not believed to obtain or desired to obtain, there are no actions without intentions;” [Searle, 1983: 82] and (2) “even though an event represented in the content of my intention occurs, it isn’t necessarily the satisfaction of my intention…, it has to come about ‘in the right way’, and this again has no analogue for beliefs and desires” [ibid]. In the recent history of analytic philosophy of mind and analytic philosophy of action there are plenty of puzzles to the thesis that intentions are the causes of intentional actions, or that intentional actions can have causal explanations, which pose a great conceptual challenge for giving an account of intentions that “come about ‘in the right way’”. I cannot illustrate all types of such puzzles here, but the important thing to notice is that Searle claims to resolve them all by making a distinction (ontologically and logically justified) between what he calls prior intentions and intentions in action. Let’s first illustrate one type of these puzzles called ‘deviant’ or ‘wayward’ causal chains, and then turn to Searle’s distinction between prior intentions and intentions in action.

52Basically deviant causal chains are counter examples to the thesis that intention causes actions sharing a basic logical structure: an individual has an intention to perform an action, his intention causes him to perform the action, but all the same he did not act intentionally. Consider the following ‘apple-version’ of a simple deviant causal chain (a variation on the first deviant causal chain example from Chisholm [1966]. Imagine that Mike intends to eat an apple, his intention to eat an apple is so overwhelming that he does not even pay attention to where he walks so that he stumbles and falls, head first, mouth opened, on an apple that he happens to eat. It is indeed very hard to consider that here Mike has eaten the apple intentionally. While such counter-example appears to be rather overdone at the surface, it is important to keep in mind that deviant causal chains examples are constructed for the purpose of bringing insights on, or checking specific definitions of, fundamental concepts such as intentions, actions and causations [Stout, 2010].

53With that in mind, let’s now turn to Searle’s distinction between prior intention and intention in action: prior intentions have their whole actions represented and caused by their conditions of satisfaction in their intentional content, while intentions in action do not have this form of representational intentionality in their conditions of satisfaction, they have a presentational intentionality so that it is just the bodily movement and the related phenomenological experience of the action (not the whole action) that is presented and caused by their intentional contents. [13] For instance imagine that Mike, is wondering around at a dinner guest party looking for an apple to eat (prior intention), when he finds the plate of apples he picks one and eats it (intention in action); Mike is here performing an intentional action because he was looking forward to do what he did (conditions of satisfaction of the prior intention) and because he experienced the bodily movements of the eating of an apple (conditions of satisfaction of the intention in action). The presentational intentionality of intentions in actions does not preclude them to have direction of fit, intentional content, conditions of satisfaction and direction of causation. To illustrate, contrast the previous account of Mike’s intention (which was indeed an account of his prior intention) to eat an apple given p. 18 with the following account of Mike’s intention in action to eat an apple. When Mike is currently intending (S = intention in action) ‘his picking and his eating of an apple’ (p), the conditions of satisfaction for his intention in action to be carried out (in the world) are that: the experience of (in his mind) the picking and the eating of the apple (and not something else) is causing his bodily movements (in the world) to pick and eat one apple; his intention in action has a world-to-mind ? direction of fit (the way he is ontologically objectively changing the world has to fit the ontologically subjective experience in his mind) that is caused by the mind-to-world direction of causation ? (the ontologically subjective experience he has in mind is causing his bodily movement to ontologically objectively change the world [14]) of the conditions of satisfaction (the ontologically subjective picking and eating of the apple).

54The distinction between prior intention and intention in action is important because (1) there are no prior intention without an intention in action represented in their intentional contents, (2) there are plenty of intentional actions without prior intentions but (3) there are no intentional actions without intentions in action; hence intentions in actions are necessary for intentional actions in a way prior intentions are not. Moreover, the presentational form of intentionality puts constraints on the aspectual shapes of the intentional contents of intentions in action (where the experience of acting has to cause the action) that are not required by the representational forms of intentionality of prior intentions (where the representation of the action has to cause the action). However, in cases where there is a prior intention, its aspectual shape translate into the intentional content of the corresponding intention in action “by transitivity of intentional causation” [Searle, 1983: 94]; hence, in such cases, the bodily movement presented in the intention in action has to correspond to the representation of the bodily movement in the prior intention for the action to be considered as intentional on Searle’s account.

55We can now re-assess the deviant causal chain example by pointing out that Mike’s bodily movement, in his intention in action, of eating an apple on the ground after he felt does not correspond to the representation of the bodily movement of eating an apple he had in his prior intention. Even if it would have been the case that, say, for certain religious reasons, Mike did have a prior intention representing his bodily movement of eating the apple by falling head first, mouth opened, on the apple, all the same he would not have acted intentionally since his prior intention does not represent the bodily movement of eating an apple as stumbling and falling; until these conditions of satisfaction are not represented in the intentional content of his prior intention, we cannot say that he acted intentionally, on Searle’s account, he just tried to do so but did not succeed. In short, it is the representation or (its causally intentional transitivity to) the experienced presentation of the bodily movement of acting that has to cause the action for the intention to come about “in the right way,” and hence for the action to be considered as an intentional action on Searle’s account.

56We have seen so far that the distinction between, on the one hand, elaborate intentional states such as beliefs and desires, and, on the other hand, more basic intentional states such as perception and intention, lies in (1) the causal self-referentiality of the latter by virtue of which they have a direction of causation that the former do not have and (2) in the presentational form of intentionality of perception and intention in action.

57The crucial point to understand the relationships between elaborate and basic mental states in Searle’s account is that beliefs and desires emerge because the mind (not the brain) is a Network of intentional states, [15] where the conditions of satisfaction of intentional states can be mutually influenced or determined by one another. In other words, the Network connects intentional states altogether. But the Network it is part of a broader Background: a set of non-intentional and presentational capacities, which are “feature[s] of our representations of reality, and not… feature[s] of the reality represented” [Searle, 1992: 191–192]. There are two interconnected dimensions of the Background: a “deep” (neuro-physiological or psychological) Background that permits to account for biological/brute facts about human beings, such as eating, seeing, intending etc., and a “local” (cultural or sociological) Background that permits to account for social/institutional facts such as dinner guest parties, understanding a movie, paying for a beer and other kinds of social know-how. It is from the Background that particular intentional states (of the Network) can have particular conditions of satisfactions with particular aspectual shapes. For instance, Mike only perceives an apple in a plate from a certain perspective and lighting conditions because he has a nervous system including, among other things, a brain, two eyes etc. (from a physiological background); and when at a dinner guest party, he believes that there is an apple in a plate, it is because (besides his perception) he knows that apples are fruits of certain shape, form, size, and more likely not to be plastic fake ones at dinner guest parties where guests are supposed to eat, etc. (from a sociological background).

58This account of Intentionality in terms of Network and Background brings an explanatory component concerning the emergence of intentional states, including elaborate ones such as beliefs and desires, which bears on the problem of the formation of preferences in economics. Let’s take an example to show how Searle’s conceptual apparatus for intentionality could explicit some types of relationships between Sen’s chooser and menu dependencies of preference with respect to the problem of the formation of preferences. Imagine that, when given a choice between a big apple and a small apple in two different situations, say, (1) at a dinner guest party, and (2) at a convivial dinner with close friends, Mike makes different choices: he chooses the smaller at the dinner guest party and the bigger at the convivial dinner with close friends.

59In Searlean terms, the presentation of the two apples (in the world) is the condition of satisfaction which (by virtue of the deep, chooser-dependent, background) causes ? Mikes’ perception ? of them, which provides the conditions of satisfaction (by virtue of both the social know-how contained in the local, chooser and menu dependent, Background and the Network) for the beliefs that ? ‘there are two apples in a plate’ and that ‘it is appropriate to take one apple’; when this is part of Mike’s Network, it can cause ? the conditions of satisfactions (by virtue of both the social know-how contained in the local, chooser and menu dependent, Background and the Network) for prior intentions ? that differ in terms of their aspectual shapes regarding the way by which it is appropriate to take one or the other apple. And if the intentional causal transitivity between the prior intentions and the intentions in action “bleached out” [Searle, 1983; 36], quoted at the beginning of this subsection), then the intentional content of the prior intention provides the conditions of satisfaction (by virtue of the Network) for desires ? “as a faded form of intention” [ibid.] that differs in terms of their aspectual shapes regarding the appropriateness of the apples in the two choice situations.

60In Senian terms, this is a case where there is, at first sight, no parametric dependence of preferences on the chooser or on the menu since in both situations the choosers and the menus are identical. However, the Searlean account reveals a slight “chooser-dependency” in that it is not the identity of the chooser but rather his social identity which is comprehensible only by an external reference to the choice situation. This is not a real problem in Sen’s framework since he has a thorough account of social identity (see Sen [2001a; 2001b; 2002c], and also Davis [2008]). Indeed the difference, in the first section, between the handling of the apple by the host and by the yelling drunkest guest, was already an account of chooser-dependency relying on social identity. Furthermore, the Searlean account also reveals a slight “menu-dependency” because, although both menus are identical from an ontologically objective point of view ({big apple, small apple}), they are different from an ontologically subjective point of view whereby the comprehensive difference in the aspectual shapes of appropriateness of both outcomes reversed itself in the two choice situations by virtue of the relationships between the ontologically subjective social identity of the chooser and the ontologically objective difference in the sizes of the apples.

61What the Searlean account suggests here is that, beyond mere terminological identity, Sen’s formalizations of “background dependency” of preferences by indexing preference relations on a set which may or may not intercept with the set of choice menus [Sen, 2002d], could become a key analytical bridge for the relationships between menu dependencies and chooser dependencies of preferences [Sen, 2002f], if the background set came to be filled by, and/or structured around, the Searlean conceptual apparatus for intentionality (with its clear cut logical relations entailed by ontological features of the underlying phenomena), illustrated in this subsection. In this way, the rationality of preference relations could be constrained by the (epistemologically objective) features of individuals’ (ontologically subjective) intentionality underlying their (ontologically objective) choice behaviors, rather than by the theorists’ (epistemologically subjective) analytical conveniences related to such or such conceptions of rationality.