Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

160 Appendix
as a corroboration of our hypothesis, we are offering a second intentional
explanation, one that posits that she is telling the truth. But this is no objection
to the procedure. We may have good independent reasons for assuming
that our agent is telling the truth. And our assumption that her report is
reliable is itself defeasible.
However, there is a further diffi culty with this form of corroboration.
In taking the agent’s reply seriously, we are also assuming that she has an
adequate grasp of her reasons for acting. She may believe she is acting for
a reason, but her behaviour may be driven by some unconscious (or barely
recognized) fear or desire. And even when she is acting for a reason, she
may have given little or no thought to what that reason was. Even where the
reasoning involved was not entirely unconscious, it may have been enthymematic
(Appendix 2.1). It may have relied on premises which the agent never
clearly articulated. (Her vote in favour of subsidised childcare may be motivated,
at least in part, by habitual political preferences. It may seem simply
obvious to her that this is the right thing to do.) In this situation, the agent
may have to interpret her own actions in order to reply to our question. 54
But again, this is not a fatal objection. All that these considerations suggest
is that this means of corroborating a hypothesis is fallible. 55 We may decide
that we have reasons to discount the agent’s own reports of her intentions.
But until we do decide this, asking the agent remains one way in which we
could test our hypothesis.
A.3.2 Weakness of Will
There is another objection to the idea that intentional explanations are
testable. It arises, once again, from the possibility of akrasia, weakness of
will. I have argued that an action impaired by weakness of will can still be
described as an intentional action, even though it is less than fully rational
(Appendix 2.3). But the possibility of weakness of will might seem to make
intentional explanations untestable, at least in the sense of being tested by
hitherto unobserved events. For between the prediction and the act falls the
agent, who may suffer from akrasia. It follows that even if the agent has the
posited beliefs and desires, she may fail to act in the way we would expect.
Once again, however, this does not seem to be a fatal objection. All it
shows is that any such prediction must have a ceteris paribus (“other things
being equal”) clause. The “other thing” to be excluded in this case is precisely
akrasia, weakness of will. But weakness of will is yet another feature
of the agent, to be taken into account alongside her beliefs and desires.
What this highlights is another feature of intentional explanations, namely
that they will often appeal to the character of the agent. 56 They may appeal
to her character to explain why she chose one apparently good reason in
preference to another. 57 But they may appeal to her character in order to
explain why she acted or failed to act in accordance with the reasons she
had. Now if we know how an agent has acted in the past, we can form some