Feeling Up to It - The Sense of Ability in the Phenomenology of Action (2011)

Anita Konzelmann Ziv · Keith Lehrer ·Hans Bernhard SchmidEditors

Self-Evaluation

Affective and Social Grounds of Intentionality

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Part IVEvaluating the Social Self

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Chapter 12Feeling Up to It – The Sense of Abilityin the Phenomenology of Action

Hans Bernhard Schmid

Trust in one’s abilities is an important condition of success. If you believe the wordsof a recent presidential candidate, lack of confidence is the main reasons why weare living such compromised lives in a world stricken by poverty, war, illness andpollution. What’s stopping us from doing better is our skepticism about what we –individually as well as collectively – could achieve. It is this negative attitude whichlead us to accept us the deal we’ve gotten so far as good enough for us. In actualfact, the future president suggested, we could get much more out of life, if only weaccepted that this is in fact possible. It is time, he argued, to break the bonds ofour negative self-image and to choose to pursue the things we have always secretlywanted and accepted as goods worthwhile having, but never really thought to bewithin our reach. The candidate claimed that there has never been anything wrongabout having high ambitions: yes, we can!

Yet there is another successful politician’s voice, coming from the distant past.As the leader of the March of the Ten Thousand, Xenophon is an expert in achiev-ing unlikely successes by means of motivational speech. But in his memorabilia(book 4, chap. 2, 26), he is far from recommending unlimited confidence. It is of theutmost importance, Xenophon argues, to be realistic about one’s abilities – individ-ually as well as collectively – and that includes knowing and accepting one’s limits.Exaggerated confidence in one’s powers is a clear sign of hubris. A bloated sense ofone’s abilities will lead agents to engage in futile endeavors. Today’s personal train-ers tend to argue against fear of failure, as failures may teach important lessons. ButXenophon reminds us that where the stakes are high, failure may mean death anddestruction to individuals as well as to communities. Thus in Xenophon’s view, akeen sense of the limits of our abilities and a skeptical attitude towards increasingambitions is far from being an obstacle in the way of getting a better deal; rather, itprotects us from harm.

H.B. Schmid (B)Department of Philosophy, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerlande-mail: [email protected]

215A. Konzelmann Ziv et al. (eds.), Self-Evaluation, Philosophical Studies Series 116,DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-1266-9_12, C© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

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This paper will not decide this dispute; rather, it focuses on the attitude aroundwhich this controversy revolves. Agents have some sort of awareness, conscious-ness, or sense of what they can and cannot do – individually or together with others,as a team. And while this sense may not be freely changed at will, it is clear that itis not merely a given, but an attitude that can be cultivated and developed. Havinga healthy sense of our abilities will help us to do the best we can while avoidinghubris and self-destruction.

Cognitive psychology has long discovered this topic. Here, the sense of abilityis the focus of a whole branch of research, especially in Self-Efficacy Theory (e.g.,Bandura 1997). Self-Efficacy theorists argue that the main role of the sense of abilityin people’s agency is that it determines the range of considered alternatives, and thussettles the question of what kind of tasks people will set themselves and take on.What people do depends on how much they want it as well as on how likely they takethemselves to succeed. By assigning expected probabilities of success to availablealternatives, the sense of ability determines the choices people make, and the amountof effort they are likely to make in pursuit of the goals they choose. People tend tomake bigger efforts in the pursuit of tasks they sense to be more difficult for them toachieve, if they decide to act accordingly. In many cases, however, a weak sense ofability will discourage people from engaging in an action; this is true for collectiveactions (Bandura 2000) as well as for individual ones.

Thus psychological research shows just how fundamental the sense of ability is.In a more general perspective, it determines the degree of involvement people takethemselves to have in their lives; it determines the degree to which they rely onthemselves rather than on other agents, or on external forces, for the fulfillment oftheir needs and desires; it determines the degree to which they see themselves asresponsible for their lives rather than dependent on other agents or external forces.In short, people’s sense of ability determines the degree to which they see their livesas being up to themselves, instead of a matter of fate or destiny. Thus the sense ofability is indeed central to people’s view of themselves, as well as to their outlookon the world; it is an important and fundamental feature of agency.

It is rather surprising that there is relatively little to be found on this topic in thereceived philosophical literature. In analytical action theory, there is a discussionabout whether or not agents may intend to do things they believe to be impossibleto do (e.g., Mele 1989; Ludwig 1992, 1995). While this is certainly pertinent tothe topic, it is a rather specific issue. (It will be argued below that this particularquestion can be dealt with successfully only on the base of an adequate account ofthe sense of ability.) As the consciousness or awareness involved in action are theproper domain of phenomenology, and as phenomenology of action has receivedincreasing attention over the last couple of years (e.g., Pacherie 2008; Roessler/Eilan[eds.] 2003), one would expect there to be a phenomenology of the sense of ability.In fact, there are analyses on the senses of ownership (Marcel 2003; Ehrsson et al.2004), purpose (Falvey 2000), and control (Nahmias 2005) involved in action. Whilethe sense of ability plays a part in all of these features, these analyses are limitedto the phenomenology of actual engagement in action, while the sense of abilityextends to potential action, and also concerns the “planning stage”.

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Among the first philosophical questions to be asked about the sense of ability iswhat kind of attitude it is. Self-Efficacy theorist do not waste much thought on thisquestion, and they tend to conceive of the sense of ability in doxastic or percep-tual terms, talking of the agent’s beliefs about – or perceptions of – their abilities.Similarly, current analytical action theory focuses on the sorts of beliefs agents mayhave concerning the feasibility their goals, thus focusing on the cognitive dimen-sion of the sense of ability. The main aim of this paper is to argue for an affectiveaccount: the sense of ability is an (extistential) feeling. This is not to say that it doesnot involve beliefs, or perceptions. Rather, the point is that it is important to con-ceive of the cognitive or perceptual component of the sense of ability as features ofa feeling.

This paper has three sections. The first section opens with some preliminary con-siderations about the concept of ability, and presents some conflicting intuitionsconcerning the structure of the sense thereof. The second section argues that anaffective account of the sense of ability is likely to be more successful in dealingwith these issues than the purely doxastic account implicit in most of the receivedliterature. The concluding section turns to the special case of joint action, where itis argued that the sense of collective ability is the feeling of mutual trust.

12.1 Some Conflicting Intuitions

What is it that our sense of ability is of or about? What is that state, quality, power,or disposition called ability?

It is typical of philosophical problems that they tend to proliferate rather thandisappear in the course of philosophical research, and this seems to be no different inthe case at issue here. There are a wide variety of analyses of the concept of ability inthe received literature.1 The matter is further complicated by the fact that the topic isapproached from very different angles, ranging from the question of compatibilism(cf., e.g., Oddie/Tichy 1982, 1983) to virtue ethics and virtue epistemology (e.g.,Sosa 1993) to the evaluative basis of normative economics (cf. Cohen 1989).

Still, there are some basic features of the concept of ability, which seem to berecognized in all or most of these analyses. In an early contribution, the German phe-nomenologist Karl Konstantin Löwenstein (1911) distinguishes two basic aspects:ability combines possibility (possibilitas) and potency (potestas) – a distinction thatis closely related to the distinction between opportunity and capability. Possibilityis the objective side of ability and describes the mode of being of what an agentcan achieve. For somebody to be able to ϕ, it has to be objectively possible that sheor he ϕs. More precisely, the possibility-aspect is that by virtue of which our abili-ties depend on our (internal or external) circumstances. (The external circumstances

1Examples from the past decades include, among many others, Kenny (1976, 1989, chap. 5);Millikan (2000, chap. 4); Morriss (2002); Hacker (2007, chap. 4) (for a critical discussion of JohnL. Austin’s thoughts on ability cf. Graham (1977, 250ff.)).

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describe the agent’s situation, the internal circumstances those inner constraints orthose “inner realities” which are not subject to the agent’s will, and which he mighttherefore experience as alien to himself, such as compulsions.) Possibility is mea-sured in degrees of probability, and this is reflected in the fact that our sense ofability can be weaker or stronger, depending on how likely we think we are tosucceed. (Needless to say that the possibility aspect of ability is somewhat morecomplicated in cases in which collective acceptance is part of the success conditionsof an action.)

Ability, however, is not exhausted by possibility. This is revealed by the factthat there are many things that are possible to do but which we still can’t do forreasons that have to do with the kind of person we take ourselves to be (our personalor moral integrity), rather than with external constraints. And conversely, there arethings we would be perfectly able to do if only they were in fact possible underthe given circumstances.2 The potency-aspect of ability is that by virtue of whichit is, in some sense or another, up to the agent whether or not he in fact realizes acertain possibility. Löwenstein calls potency a “dynamic principle” which cannot befurther analyzed. But it seems that various factors play a role here. In order to be“potent”, an agent has to be goal-oriented, she has to have some motor control, andsome representation or concepts of what it is she is capable of doing, even thoughthese are necessary rather than sufficient conditions (it is important not to conceiveof representations in terms of the use of conceptual capacities, as this would leadinto a conception according to which only beings who have a concept of using aconcept would have any ability at all).

I already emphasized that possibility and potency do not coincide; at the sametime, it seems that they are more closely interrelated than simply in terms of overlap-ping extensions. Everyday descriptions of the surrounding world are deeply imbuedwith action opportunities, and descriptions of competences are always made againstthe background of normal circumstances. The fact of the matter is that it is hard tothink of the everyday world in other ways than in terms of action opportunities, andit seems impossible to think of competences in other ways than in terms of what canactually be done in the world as we know it, i.e. in terms of typical situations. So itseems that possibilities are always individuated against the background of potencies,and vice versa.

Some more distinctions are in order. Ability can either refer to action types, orto token actions. It is usually thought that under normal circumstances at least, theformer is implied in the latter, whereas the converse is not the case. An agent maybe an able piano player, but he may be unable to play that piano right now for somereason having to do with the situation or other factors. The distinction at issue hereis between two meanings of ability: ability in terms of “scire” or “savoir”, or in thesense of “posse” or “pouvoir”, where the former refers to action types, and the latterto token actions.

2Throwing one’s rich spinster aunt from the train would be an example for the former case, openingyet another bottle after one has emptied the last remaining one an example for the latter.


Another distinction that is relevant to the topic is the one between complex andsimple actions, as ability might be something quite different depending on the kindof action in question. Concerning the phenomenology of simple actions, I find thedistinction between causally basic actions and intentionally basic actions especiallyimportant (Hornsby 1980). Moving one’s hand is causally more basic than turningon the light, because the movement of one’s hand causes the light to go on. But turn-ing on the light is intentionally basic for most agents because we are able to do it“just like that”, that is, without having to do something else intentionally. Intentionalbasicness and thus the bottom level of our awareness of our agency, is determined byour abilities. Needless to say, intentional basicness is relative; what is intentionallybasic for one person might not be basic for another. Under normal circumstances,however, bodily movements are intentionally basic and are thus our fundamentalabilities. As to complex actions, it seems that whoever is able to perform that actionmust be able to perform some possible combination of simple actions, which real-izes the complex action; there might be many, however, and the agent need not becommitted to any single one of them.

What is the relation between ability and the agent’s sense thereof? In his paperon the concept of ability, Löwenstein strongly urges his readers not to confuse thetwo. Our sense of ability might not tell us much about our actual abilities; as inmany other kinds of self-evaluative attitudes, our sense of ability is far from beinginfallible. Having a sense of ability isn’t a necessary, let alone a sufficient conditionof ability. There might be abilities of which we have no sense whatsoever, and con-versely, people routinely take themselves to be able to do things of which they turnout to be utterly unable. Still, the fact of the matter seems to be that agents do have asense, i.e. some form of awareness, of whatever they take to be their abilities; thereis some phenomenal quality involved in this attitude, something “it is like” for theagents to have that sense.

With these preliminary remarks in mind, let us now turn to some conflictingintuitions, which seem to make the topic interesting from a philosophical point ofview. It seems plausible to assume that our sense of ability is subject to rationalconstraints (one’s sense of ability can be under- or over-developed to the degreeof irrationality), that it is informed by experience (especially by precedent), andthat it limits the class of possible objects of intention (a sense of complete inabilityprevents us from forming a corresponding intention: there is some plausibility inassuming that one cannot seriously intend to do what one takes to be impossible todo). Yet there are plausible objections to all of these claims. It seems that a strongcase can easily be made for the view that first, the sense of ability is, to a largedegree, self-confirming rather than subject to rational constraints, and that second,it is a matter of convention rather than a matter of experience, and third, that itdoes not limit the class of possible objects of intention, as one may easily think ofcases of intending the subjectively impossible. The following remarks touch on thefirst two conflicts only briefly and go into some more depth with regard to the thirdissue.

Here is why it might seem plausible to assume that our sense of ability is subjectto tight rational constraints. If agent A has some pro-attitude towards ϕ-ing, but A

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does not intend to ϕ only because A takes herself to be unable to ϕ, and wherethere is no evidence for A to take herself to be unable to ϕ, or where there is evenevidence that A could ϕ, we would probably call A irrational. In that case, A’s senseof ability is irrationally under-developed (this is highlighted by the fact that peopleroutinely object to such attitudes in trying to convince the respective person of hisor her abilities: “You can do it!”). The converse case is where A’s sense of abilityseems to be over-developed to the degree of irrationality. This is the case where Adoes intend to ϕ in spite of the fact that there is reason to take him- or herself tobe utterly unable to ϕ. So there are limiting cases, in which an under-developed orover-developed sense of ability is irrational.

But the rational constraints to which the sense of ability is subject go even further.Not just the question of whether or not one should take oneself to have any chanceof success seems to be a question of rationality, but also the degree to which oneshould be confident of one’s abilities. There is a rational ideal in which one’s actualabilities and one’s sense thereof coincide, and the task of becoming a fully rationalagent does not only seem a matter of having a sense of what is within or beyondone’s scope, but having a sharpened sense of just how much one can rely on one’sabilities under the given circumstances.

So much for the first intuition, which seems to be implicit in much of receivedaction theory, as well as in folk psychology. Now, here is a reason for doubt. Iassume that anyone who has spent some time in different milieus and cultures willagree that there are cultural standards concerning the question of just how confidentpeople are expected to be of their own abilities, and that these standards vary a greatdeal. In some milieus, people are expected to show a greater amount of confidencethan in others. Some milieus foster or enforce what might appear to others as anoverly high degree of confidence (“Believe in yourself! You can do it, if you reallywant!”), whereas other milieus seem to instill a level of confidence that might appearto outsiders as self-debilitatingly low.

According to the predominant stereotypes, these differences are particularlyblatant between rural and urban milieus, between professional groups such asphilosophers and business people, and perhaps between Europe and the UnitedStates. If we limit ourselves to the intercultural case, this observation puts us ina rather uncomfortable position. If we hold on to the rationality claim, and if weagree that the difference is not one of people’s actual abilities, but rather of peo-ple’s sense thereof, it seems that we have to rank cultures and milieus in accordancewith the degree of rationality they seek to instill in people’s self-image. This, how-ever, collides with our intuition that attempts to judge the rationality of culturalstandards usually simply amounts to claiming rationality for one’s own cultural stan-dard, which amounts to chauvinism rather than epistemic rationality. If we acceptthis intuition, we seem to be caught in a conceptual dilemma. The two intuitions,both of which are plausible enough for themselves, turn out to be incompatible. Theproblem with which we are left therefore seems to be to reconcile the intuition thatthe sense of ability is subject to rational standards with the intuition that the senseof ability is subject to conventions, especially to norms of propriety, character, orculture.


It might seem, though, that this is only an apparent conflict, and that we shouldn’tbe too worried about cross-cultural claims to rationality. After all, it seems that thereis an easy way to find out whether or not one’s sense of ability is on target: onesimply has to put the matter to the test, and to undergo a reality check. This seemsto be how intentional under- or over-confidence is conclusively revealed. This leadsto the second pair of conflicting intuitions (which is really just a version of the firstone). It seems plausible to assume that the acquisition and development of one’ssense of ability is a matter of making good use of available evidence, especiallyprecedent, which is a matter of epistemic rationality. Developing a sense of ability,one might think, is a matter of learning from experience, from success and failureproviding a standard to which our sense of ability can and should conform.

Plausible as this intuition might seem, it is rather obvious that in actual fact, peo-ple do not usually let experience interfere with their sense of ability, but rather tendto interpret available evidence in such a way that their sense of ability is confirmed.Thus people with a rather strong sense of ability will be quick to ascribe their fail-ures to their own not having tried hard enough – “I would have succeeded if only Ihad put my back into it”. And conversely, people with a rather weak sense of abilitywill be quick in ascribing unexpected successes, where they occur, to anything buttheir own abilities: “I guess I was just lucky”. So neither of these will let experienceinterfere with their sense of ability.

This is to say that there are ways in which an agent’s sense of ability mightbe immune to experience, and largely self-confirming. It is an open question if wecan dismiss such cases simply as irrational, or pathological: how should we tell?Doubting the irrationality of self-immunization is not to deny that experience canand should play some role in the development of an agent’s sense of ability. Butthe fact of the matter is: the question of whether or not any given case of success(or failure) speaks for (or against) an agent’s abilities – rather than being due tothe agent’s sheer luck (or lack of willpower) – is, to some degree at least, left tothe agent’s (or some other observer’s) discretion. You simply never know. It is true,of course, that complete immunity against experience, as it occurs in cases suchas those just mentioned, might become increasingly difficult to uphold in repeatedcases; but the fact remains that our sense of ability inevitably has to draw fromother sources than experience. Part of our sense of ability is a priori. This becomesapparent if we construe a purely empiricist counter-example to the abovementionedself-immunizers. Think of an agent who takes himself to be able to ϕ if and onlyif his last attempt to ϕ was successful. It seems obvious that we would call such anagent’s sense of ability inadequate, because in many cases, success and failure aredue to the circumstances or to lack of effort rather than to ability or inability. Thusa further qualification has to be added: the circumstances need to be normal andthe agent’s effort sufficient. A reasonable empiricist about ability would take herselfto be able to ϕ if under normal circumstances and with adequate effort, she hassuccessfully ϕ-ed before. This, however, leads into a circle: in order to determinewhich circumstances are “normal”, and which level of effort is “adequate”, we haveto appeal to the agent’s (or some generalized agent’s) abilities; the explanandumreappears in the explanans. If this line of thought is sound, we end up with another

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pair of conflicting intuitions. In this respect, the problem of an adequate concept ofour sense of ability is to reconcile our intuition that our sense of ability is informedby experience with the equally plausible intuition that it is basically a priori, immuneagainst experience, and, to some degree at least, self-confirming.

The third issue is whether or not the agent’s sense of ability limits the class ofpossible objects of intention. As mentioned above, this question has attracted someattention in received action theory (the following discussion is focused on priorintentions3).

Why should one think that there are any limitations to one’s objects of intentionsat all? The point of departure is that there seem to be things, which – in one’s rightmind at least – one simply cannot intend to do. I can intend to run seven miles, butI cannot intend to run one hundred (as I know I would collapse trying). I can intendto improve the paper I’m writing, but I cannot, in my right mind, intend to discussit with Wilfrid Sellars (as I don’t think I can talk to the dead). I can intend to takemy sunglasses with me, but I cannot intend to make the sun shine (as I assume thatthis is beyond my powers). This is not to say that such intentions are meaningless(such as the intention to pink). All of the above are actions, and therefore, to somedegree, suited for intention on a purely conceptual level. But they are not suited formy intentions, or the intentions of average beings. I can well imagine to be doing allof these things; the range of imagination (and perhaps of desire) might be unlimited,but the range of intention is not. So one might wonder: How precisely is the limitand scope of actions one can make the objects of one’s intention determined?

Considering the above examples it seems plausible to assume that one’s sense ofability plays a crucial, perhaps even the decisive role here. I will defend this viewby discussing a couple of alternative ways in which it has been formulated in thereceived literature, and by trying to accommodate a plausible objection.

A first thought is the following. Philosophers such as Paul Grice (1971) andDavid Velleman (1989) seem to have argued that for action A to be the object ofagent P’s intention, P has to believe (or at least to accept) that she or he will A.The claim appears to be that one cannot intend to do what one does not believe one

3Most philosophers of action use a distinction of the sort of the one between prior intention andintention-in-action (Searle 1983). Prior intentions are the “plans” of (or “projects” for) an actionthat do not, as such, involve any practical engagement; one might have a prior intention withoutcurrently doing anything about it, such as in the case of the intention to spend next year’s summerin Spain. Intentions-in-action, by contrast, are the feature by virtue of which a given complex ofbehavior is an action. Along similar lines, Michael Bratman (1987) distinguishes between future-directed and present-directed intention; Alfred Mele (1992) has the distinction between distal andproximate intention. This distinction is usually taken to be a matter of the temporal structure – theprior intention comes first and terminates in the intention-in-action –, but one can also interpret thisdifference as a difference in terms of the kind of practical reasoning at work in these cases, and ofthe kind of representation of the content. Prior intentions are a matter of deliberation, intentions-in-action a matter of implementation and practical skills (with different sets of abilities involved). Itseems obvious that our sense of ability extends to all levels of intentionality, ranging from a senseof the reach of our limbs (or, in the case of internal actions, the scope of mental resources availableto us) up to the kinds of plans to which we can commit ourselves.


will do. And obviously, one cannot believe that one will do what one does not takeoneself to be able to do.

It has been objected – by Bratman (1999), among others – that this is too restric-tive, at least if belief (or acceptance) is taken to be all-or-nothing. People intend todo all sorts of things they do not really believe (or accept) they will actually achieve.In his Change in View (1986), Gilbert Harman provides an example. He considersthe case of a sniper aiming at an ambassador; the sniper takes himself to be a ter-ribly bad marksman, and therefore he does not really believe (or accept) that he isable to shoot the ambassador. Rather, he thinks he will probably miss his target.Nevertheless, he has a go at it, he aims and pulls the trigger. In this case, Harmanargues, the object of the agent’s intention differs from what he thinks he will do.What the sniper intends to do is to shoot the ambassador. But he does not believethat he will in fact shoot the ambassador. Rather, he thinks that he will miss his tar-get. So Grice and Velleman’s statement seems too strong. For ϕ to be the object ofA’s intention, A does not have to believe (or accept) that she or he will ϕ.

But there are at least two weaker versions of the limitation claim. The first isthe following: for ϕ to be an object of A’s intention, A has to believe (or assume,or accept) that there is a chance that she will ϕ; she might take her chance to beminimal, but in her view, it has to be greater than zero. A needs some confidence con-cerning her prospects of success, however minimal it may be (e.g., Wallace 2001).All that is said is that there has to be some sense of ability, however weak, andhowever minimal.

Another version (endorsed by Bratman 1987 and Mele 1989) is that A cannottake herself to be utterly unable to ϕ if she intends to ϕ (cf. Baier 1970). This is evenmore liberal a limitation claim: Nothing is said about the background conditions ofintention except the following: the fact that ϕ is the object of A’s intention is incom-patible with A’s sense that his or her chances at success are zero. Intention doesnot involve any certainty of success, and is perfectly compatible with any degreeof self-doubt, as far as it is self-doubt, and not certainty of inability. It is clear thatone can intend to do things one is all but certain to be unable to carry out – remem-ber Harman’s sniper. Ambitious intentionality is not in conflict with the limitationclaim. Life would be boring indeed if we limited our intention to objects which weare confident to be able to carry out (even though we might have good reasons totake Xenophon’s advice to heart and try to avoid constant failures). All that is saidis that we cannot intend to do what we are convinced we cannot possibly achieve.

Before proceeding any further and discussing the problematic consequences ofthe limitation claim, a possible alternative has to be addressed. In current actiontheory, the limitation claim is often bypassed rather than rejected. It is assumed thatit can be avoided by choosing an alternative approach to intentionality. We normallythink of intentions in terms of what we express with the words “A intends to ϕ”.Put this way, intentions are action referential, as the object of the intention is anaction. Moreover, this limits the class of possible objects of intention to the agent’sown actions, since it seems plausible that one can directly intend only what one doesoneself. In other words, if intention is action-referential, it is action self-referential.If I express my intention in terms of “I intend to close the door”, it is clear that I

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intend the closing of the door as my own action. If you pre-empt my plan and closethe door before I get around to doing it, my intention does not reach its conditionsof satisfaction. It is true that I wanted the door to be closed, so that my desire isnow satisfied, but as I intended to close the door myself, my intention isn’t. I cannotintend your closing the door directly; all I can intend is to make you closing thedoor, which is action self-referential as the making is something I have to do myself(e.g., by means of asking you to close the door).

Now what about intentions of the form “I intend that the door be closed”? Let uscall this way of putting intention propositional, since the objects of these inten-tions are propositions (or propositional contents) rather than actions. If I intendthat the door be closed, it does not seem to matter how this is achieved: the jobmight be done by myself, anybody else, or perhaps by the wind. The subject ofthe action, if there is any, need not be identical with the subject of the intention.I might intend that I close the door, or that you close the door, or that we do ittogether. This widens the scope of possible objects of intention beyond the limi-tations mentioned above (Vermazen 1993). I can now, it seems, intend all sorts ofthings which are not my own actions: for example, I can intend that we go for awalk together, which is clearly something I do not take myself to be able to do,since it takes at least two to be done: we can do it, I can’t. So the question is:shouldn’t intention be expressed in propositional rather than in action referentialterms?

Wilfrid Sellars (1992, 183f.) has argued rather forcefully (and convincingly) thatpropositional intentions are expressions of practical commitments only by virtue oftheir conceptual tie to action referential intentions. Sellars says that the intentionthat X, when made explicit, spells as the intention to do whatever is necessary tomake it the case that X, which is action self-referential, because again, one has todo the making oneself. I still think he is right. But it is completely sufficient for thepurpose of this paper to accept action referential intention as one important kind ofintention, and that the action-referential mode of expressing intention should not beabandoned completely, even though it might not be the only way of thinking aboutintention. So let us limit the limitation claim to action referential intentions. Thefollowing, then, seems acceptable: A cannot intend to ϕ if A takes himself/herselfto be utterly unable to ϕ. So it seems that our sense of ability does limit the class ofpossible objects of intention.

This claim, however, is not uncontested, either. Here is why. It seems plausibleto say that if A takes herself to be unable to ϕ, she could at least try to ϕ. (Afterall, this is one possible way in which learning gets started; a person who cannotbring herself to plunge into the water because she takes herself to be unable to swimmight be encouraged to try to swim.) This is not incompatible with the limitationclaim, insofar as “trying” functions as a proper action term, that is, if in order to tryto ϕ one does not have to intend to ϕ (for an early defense of this thesis cf. Mele1989). If “trying” is a proper action term, “trying to ϕ” and “ϕ-ing” have entirelydifferent success conditions: for one’s intention to try to ϕ to reach its conditions ofsatisfaction, one may have to have made one’s best effort; but one does not have tohave ϕ-ed. Thus in the case where “trying” is a proper action term “trying to ϕ” and


“ϕ-ing” are really different actions. If this is the case, one does not have to intend toϕ in order to try to ϕ; it is enough to intend to try to ϕ.

So the question is: are cases in which people who take themselves be unable to ϕ

may at least try to ϕ limited to cases in which “trying” functions as a proper actionterm? Are cases of aiming at the subjectively impossible limited to proper-action-tryings? If so, the limitation claim is unproblematic. If not, we’re in trouble.

Even though I think that there are many cases in which “trying” does function as aproper action term, I agree with Kirk Ludwig (1992, 1995) that there are some casesof aiming at the subjectively impossible in which trying is not a proper action term.Clear-cut examples can be found in Ludwig’s papers. Let me instead give an exam-ple that could be construed either way, in order to come to a clearer understandingof the conceptual issues at stake here.

Consider a group of people joined around a breakfast table. A jar of jam with atightly closed lid is passed among the members, each taking turns in trying to openthe lid. After all the strong women and men in the group have had their go at itin vain, the jar is passed to little Benjamin, last in the group, sitting at the far endof the table. Benjamin may be small, but he is sensible. Assume that as such, heis perfectly aware of the situation: he knows very well how his forces compare tothose of the other group members, he is aware of the fact that tightly closed lids donot loosen gradually. Making good use of the available evidence, Benjamin believeshe doesn’t stand the slightest chance at opening the jar. But as all the others in thegroup have had their go, he thinks that he should have his, too.

Obviously, Benjamin intends to try to open the jar. But does “trying”, in thisdescription, work as a proper action term or not? If the case is to be compatible withthe limitation claim, we should think it does so, and in fact, this seems perfectlyplausible given the circumstances: Benjamin does not intend to open the jar; rather,he intends to make an effort, and his intention will be satisfied by his making aneffort, not by his opening the jar. But the example is designed so as to allow foranother interpretation. Consider two versions of Benjamin, assuming two differentframes of mind: BenjaminR, the realist, has just finished his reading of Xenophon’sMemorabilia, and he is in a “know thy limits”-frame of mind. BenjaminO, the opti-mist, is just back from one of Obama’s stomp speeches. He is in a can-do mood, buthe is not as stupid as to ignore the facts. BenjaminR tries to open the jar in terms of aproper action term; avoiding any intentional hubris, he is perfectly aware of the factthat he does not stand any chance of success. But happens to think that in terms ofa group ritual, he should have his go at the jar, too, if all the others have had theirs.His intention is not to open the jar, but rather to exert as strong a force as he canmuster on the closed lid. This is all he wants to do, and expects to be able to carryit out. His intention will be satisfied by his having had a go at the matter, i.e. hishaving pushed as hard as he can at the closed lid.

Now assume that in spite of all appearances, and much to the surprise of allparticipants in the event, the jar suddenly opens in BenjaminR’s hands (perhaps itwas all a set-up, and the lid was loosened by remote control). What will BenjaminR’sreaction be? One might assume that he will be pleased by the result; he might evenstart to boast about his hidden forces, mistaking the result for a proof that he is

226 H.B. Schmid

stronger than he appears, after all. While all this might well be the case, however,there will be an element of slight embarrassment in his reaction to the event. Even ifhe takes the result to speak for his greater hidden forces, which he likes, he will haveto perceive the result as somewhat undermining his status as a competent agent.After all, competent agents know what they can do. And there is a sense in whichthis is not the case here: there is a lacuna between BenjaminR’s intention, and hisaction: instead of merely trying, he ended up opening the jar. He did something hedidn’t strictly want to do, even though the result may be far from unwelcome.

Now consider BenjaminR’s optimistic twin, BenjaminO. BenjaminO takes awholly different approach to the matter. The difference, however, is not one of epis-temic rationality. BenjaminO may be optimistic, but he is not ignorant. He is ascertain as BenjaminR that he does not stand any chance at opening the jar. Thuswhen BenjaminO has his go at it, resulting in the unexpected opening of the jar, hewill be just as surprised by the lid’s coming loose as BenjaminR, and he, just asBenjaminR, welcomes this unexpected result. But by contrast to his realist coun-terpart, his joy is not impaired by any embarrassment. In spite of his not havingtaken himself to stand any chance beforehand, he perceives the opening of the jar assomething he did intentionally. Opening the jar was what he was trying to do. So bycontrast To BenjaminR, he doesn’t feel his competence undermined by the eventsthe least bit; rather, he feels his agential competence to be unexpectedly expandedby his turning out to be able to do what nobody – himself included – had taken himto be able to carry out.4 So in a sense, his reaction is contrary to his realist twin’s;the events satisfy his intention, if rather unexpectedly, rather than crossing his plans.

But how is this possible? How could Benjamin intend to open the jar while think-ing this is impossible? If cases such as BenjaminO’s are possible, we are left witha further dilemma. The problem now is to reconcile our intuition that we cannotintend to do what we take ourselves to be unable to perform with the intuition thatin some cases of trying the impossible, “trying” is not a proper action term, that is,that sometimes, people do intend to do what they take themselves to be unable tocarry out. We have to find a way to reconcile the intuition that the objects of inten-tion are limited by what one takes oneself to be able to do with the intuition thatthere are cases of intending the subjectively impossible.

4In his “Impossible Doings” (1992), as well as in some later papers on the topic, Kirk Ludwigcontested that claim. Ludwig discusses the following example. P assumes (with certainty) that thebattery of his car is dead. Upon another person’s request, he turns the ignition key. Contrary to whathe expects, the engine starts. Ludwig claims that it would be wrong to say that P started the engineunintentionally. I agree with Ludwig that there are some cases of trying the subjectively impossiblewhere “trying” does not function as a proper action term. I argue, however, that in such cases, theagent must take himself to have a chance at success, however minimal, which might be in conflictwith his conscious assessment of the situation. Sometimes the agent’s intentional self-confidenceis not in tune with their beliefs concerning their ability. If this is true, Ludwig’s point does notprove that it is not the case that people cannot intend to do what they take themselves to be unableto carry out. The question is how to understand the “taking”: insofar as it is mere belief, Ludwig isright; insofar as it is confidence, he is not.


The authors in the received literature are divided between the two horns of thedilemma. It is either argued that BenjaminO’s case does not exist, i.e. that one cannotintend to do what one believes to be impossible (e.g., Adams 1995). Or it is arguedthat agents may intend impossible doings, and that the intuition that agents cannotintend what they take to be impossible to carry out is wrong (Ludwig 1995).

In BenjaminO’s case, this amounts either to saying that he does not really intendto open the jar after all (but rather to try to open the jar, in terms of an action thatis different from opening the jar), or that his optimism leads to ignorance so that hedoes not really believe that he is unable to open the jar. The first alternative couldbe worked out by allowing for cases in which people can intentionally do things,which they did not intend to do (BenjaminO could then rightly credit the result ofhis effort to his having intended this effect, without having to act on an intentionwhich is inconsistent with his beliefs). But this distinction between intending toϕ and ϕ-ing intentionally seems rather ad hoc. Introducing this ambiguity into theconcept of intention needs strong arguments; until such arguments are provided, Isee no reason to depart from the straightforward view that A ϕ-s intentionally if andonly if A intends to ϕ. The second alternative seems unattractive because it forcesus to assume complete cognitive irrationality: why should BenjaminO ignore suchpertinent factors such as his beliefs about his strength? The question therefore is:is there a third way which allows us to accommodate such cases without resortingeither to ad hoc conceptual “ambiguations”, or to ascriptions of complete epistemicirrationality?

In the following, I suggest an alternative which accommodates both intuitions:people do sometimes intend the subjectively impossible; but I argue that in thesecases, there is a sense in which it is true that they do not take themselves to beunable to attain their goals, even though they continue to have the belief that theycannot attain their goal.

12.2 The Sense of Ability as an Affective Attitude

The discussion of the limitation dilemma has left us with the puzzle that in somecases, it seems that people intend to do the subjectively impossible; at the same time,it seems plausible to assume that one cannot intend to do what one takes oneself tobe utterly incapable of doing. In the received literature, an incompatibilist line istaken; either the first or the second intuition is dropped in favor of the other. I donot think that this is viable, and I suggest that we look for an alternative: a way toaccommodate both intuitions. I shall argue that this is possible within an affectiveaccount of the sense of ability, which will also make the two other dilemmas appearmuch less problematic.

Let us start with a closer look at the problem. If we hold on to both intuitions, itseem that agents such as BenjaminO do and do not take themselves to be unable toachieve their goals at the same time. It seems plausible to say that BenjaminO doesintend to open the jar, and in order to intend to open the jar, he cannot take himself

228 H.B. Schmid

to be utterly unable to open the jar. At the same time he is convinced that he cannotopen the jar, and thus he does take himself to be unable to open the jar. The positionunderlying most of the received literature seems to be that such cases of practical orcognitive incoherence simply cannot occur.

But let us have a closer look. Why should it be a problem that agents believe thatp and do not believe that p at the same time? Why shouldn’t we say that this is justanother case of “cognitive dissonance”, or inconsistent attitudes, as they often occurin real world psychologies? The problem with this liberal view is the following. Foran attitude to be of the kind of a belief, there need to be some degree of consistency.It is true that people often hold inconsistent beliefs. But these do not usually havethe form of occurrent beliefs in the same domain of an agent’s doxastic system,and they certainly cannot remain beliefs once awareness their conflict is achieved.Perhaps one can entertain the thought that something is p, and that the same thingis not p at the same time, but this way of entertaining a thought is not the sameas having beliefs. If an agent has incompatible beliefs, as it often happens, at leastone of the conflicting beliefs cannot be occurrent and be conscious as conflicting,such as in the case of incompatible conclusions following from accepted premises,which the agent fails to draw, or some such. In such cases the agent “could haveknown” one his beliefs was false, but he failed to draw the necessary conclusions,and thus may be called holding on to incompatible beliefs. Since in BenjaminO’scase, both attitudes – his belief and his intention – are clearly occurrent, and in thesame domain of his doxastic system, it does indeed seem problematic to say thatBenjaminO does and does not take himself to be unable to open the jar. The epis-temic restrictions on belief make it plausible to choose either horn of the dilemma.How could there be a third alternative?

Recent theory of practical reason has tended to become somewhat less restrictivewith regard to the “Myth of Practical Consistency” (Kolodny 2008). And indeedthere is a special area in philosophy of mind and action in which case of agentssubscribing to incompatible cognitive contents is quite familiar. Recent philoso-phy of the emotions has devoted a considerable amount of attention to the fact thatemotions do involve cognitive components (it is an open issue not to be discussedhere whether the cognitions implied in emotions should be conceived of in termsof perceptions, judgments, or simply in terms of beliefs). Moreover, the fact thatthe cognitions or judgments that are implicit in affective states can be in conflictwith the agent’s beliefs has become a well-studied phenomenon under labels suchas “recalcitrant emotions”. The example that is usually chosen in the current debateis that of a person being afraid of flying in spite of her belief that this poses little orno danger. Earlier examples include David Hume’s discussion of the fear a personfeels at the sight of a precipice under her feet, even when she is protected by aniron cage and therefore knows that there is no imminent danger (Hume [1739/1740]2000, book 1, part 3, section 13, §10). In his Expression of Emotion, Charles Darwin(1872, 38) discusses a similar case when he reports being afraid of a snake even ifhe knows that it poses no danger, because it is behind a glass wall.

In cases of recalcitrant emotions, the agent is subject to some degree of irrational-ity; there is some inconsistency in his attitude. What makes emotional recalcitrance


interesting for our topic, however, is that it allows for conflicting cognitions to beoccurrent in agents. People who experience recalcitrant emotions are often perfectlyaware of the conflict between how they feel about the object of their emotion, andhow they think about it – just remember Darwin’s experimental setting. Recalcitrantemotions allow for occurrent cognitive inconsistency without undermining the sta-tus of the agent as a cognizer, or holder of beliefs. And this is exactly what seemsto be needed in order to explain the case where agents have an intention to ϕ (andcannot, therefore, take themselves to be utterly unable to ϕ), and believe that theyare unable to ϕ. We have argued above that it is not possible to have the occurrentbelief that p and that non-p at the same time in the same domain, because for anattitude to be of the kind of a belief, there need be some consistency. The case ofemotional recalcitrance, however, shows us how cognitive inconsistency is possible:it is well possible, and even quite frequent in our lives, that we believe that p andyet feel that non-p. This inconsistency does not undermine the status of the belief; abelief that p is a belief that p, no matter of how one feels about it.

The Platonic answer to the question of how such inconsistency is possible is thatthere are two separate systems of cognitive appraisal or evaluation at work here: theemotions do a quick and dirty job at identifying the most relevant features of a givensituation; our reason, by contrast, works slowly and deliberatively. In most cases,the two cognitive systems work smoothly hand in hand, and one learns from theother. My anger informs me of the depravation I have experienced with the loss ofmy bicycle, and it is directed at John as the suspected thief. Here, the emotions serveas watchdogs for reason. As soon as I am presented with evidence from which I caninfer that John isn’t the culprit after all, my anger at him vanishes. In some cases –particularly in cases of recalcitrant emotions – however, the conflict persists. Thesecases undermine, to some degree, our overall rationality, as our perspective on thematter at hand is split. But such cases do not undermine our status as bearers ofbeliefs. My belief that the snake poses no danger is still a belief, and no less firma belief, in the face of my feeling threatened by the snake. I’m subject to somedegree of irrationality, of cognitive and perhaps practical inconsistency; but I’m noless having a belief and experiencing an emotion. Such conflicts are conceptuallypossible.

My suggestion is that this is not only a parallel, but that cases in which agentsintend to do what they believe they are utterly incapable of doing are in fact casesof emotional recalcitrance, because the sense of ability is an affective attitude, i.e.an attitude of the kind of an emotion. The sense of ability is the feeling of being upto a task, the feeling of self-trust, or self-confidence. Part of the reason why this isnot listed among the affective attitudes in the received literature is that it belongs toa special class of affective attitudes (I will come back to this topic at the end of thissection).

As a case of emotional recalcitrance, the feeling of being up to a task, which oneperfectly knows one cannot fulfill, is abnormal and irrational. But such cases arenot conceptually impossible. I submit that this is exactly what happens in the caseof conflict between what we intend and what we take ourselves to be able to do.These are cases of conflict between what we know in our heads and what we feel

230 H.B. Schmid

in our guts. Sometimes we’re in an overly self-confident gung-ho mood and feelup to things we know in our head we won’t be able to do. And perhaps even morefrequent is the converse case. People might want to ϕ, they might perfectly knowthat they could easily ϕ – and they still fail to form a corresponding intention for thesole reason they just don’t feel up to it, that is for sheer lack of self-confidence, orself-trust.

This problem is usually misunderstood as one of the will or one of reason in thephilosophical literature, but it is a matter of the third part of the platonic soul, aproblem of the thymos, that is, of our affective attitudes. In order to act, one has todesire, one has to have some beliefs, but one also has to feel up to the task, and insome cases at least, this turns out to be an entirely different matter. In these cases,our sense of ability – our feeling up to the task or its opposite – turns out to berecalcitrant with regard to our beliefs.

The fact that our sense of ability is basically an affective attitude is furthersubstantiated if we turn back to the other two conceptual dilemmas that we haveencountered above. The first problem was to reconcile our intuition that our senseof ability is subject to rational constraints (and a rational ideal) with the intuitionthat it is largely a matter of convention (i.e. of character and culture). This doublenature is typical of many affective states – consider the cases of joy or anger. It iswithin the conventional standards of a culture that we judge a feeling appropriate orinappropriate; at the same time, affective states are subject to rational constraints,especially with regard to their cognitive components.

The second problem was to reconcile our intuition that our sense of ability isinformed by experience with the intuition that it is immune to experience and toa large degree self-confirming. Again, I can only point out that we know this phe-nomenon from the philosophy of the emotions. It is a well-known feature of affectivestates that they seek out evidence for themselves: just as to the loving eye, every-thing tends to look beautiful, it seems that to the confident eye, everything tends tolook feasible.

Thus I suggest that our sense of ability is basically an affective attitude, i.e. amatter of the question of whether or not, and to what degree, an agent “feels up toa task”. This suggestion might seem rather unusual, as affective attitudes are nor-mally divided into moods (such as boredom or nervousness, where there is no clearintentional object) and emotions (such as anger, joy, surprise or fear), neither listof which includes anything coming close to the sense of ability. Yet recent philo-sophical thinking has taught us to expand the class of affective attitudes beyondthe classical moods and emotions. In particular, Matthew Ratcliffes’ (2005, 2008)important work on existential feelings includes such feelings as the feeling of home-liness and alienation, belonging and separation, power and control. Ratcliffe argues,in a somewhat Heideggerian vein, that these feelings are not “emotional” in the nar-row sense of the term, but that they are affective in nature, and that they are the basicway in which we are “in the world”. I suggest that the sense of ability is the mostfundamental existential feeling, and that many other existential feelings – such asthe sense of belonging or separation, and even the “sense of reality” – are ultimatelybased on our sense of ability.


12.3 The Sense of Ability in Joint Action

The previous chapters focused on self-directed forms of the sense of ability, i.e. onthe sense of one’s own abilities. Yet our sense of ability need not be self-directed; itmay also be other-directed, general, or group directed. In this concluding section ofthe paper, I shall concentrate on the latter form, and sketch out the bearings of theresult of the previous sections for the theory of joint action.

As any parent will easily admit, there are situations in which our sense of anotherperson’s abilities is equally direct and immediate, and perhaps even sharper andmore alert as the sense of our own. In such situations, we have a keen sense, i.e. agut feeling for what is within and what is beyond another’s powers. This, however,is not the only way in which our sense of ability might not be simply self-directed.There are two mixed cases. Competent members of a community will usually havea sense of general abilities, that is, a gut feeling for what “one”, i.e. the anonymousaverage individual person (the agent himself included), is capable of doing. Thusthe general sense of ability provides a standard for our notion of an agent. Last butnot least, people have a group-directed sense of ability. Just as people’s individualconduct is in part guided by a sense of what they can do individually, there is asense of what they, as a group, can do together. This sense of collective abilityguides people’s joint actions. And it is perhaps not surprising at all that this sense isfrequently made appeal to in political rhetoric (“Yes, we can!”).

Joint actions imply individual actions, but these individual actions are not inde-pendent of each other, but closely intertwined, and an important task in the analysisof joint agency is to find out more about the precise nature of the interrelations atstake here. Some characteristics seem rather obvious: if an individual intends his orher contribution as his or her contribution to a joint venture, she or he cannot becompletely indifferent as to what the other contributors do, and how successful theyare likely to be, because the success of her contribution, and even the question ofwhat it really is she is doing, depends on the relevant others’ actions. Participatoryintentionality presupposes certain attitudes towards other people’s intentions andactions. I cannot intend to score the match-winning goal if I know nobody is play-ing in a way similar to the way in which I cannot intend to run one hundred milesif I know I couldn’t possibly make it past thirty. I might imagine me scoring thedecisive goal while playing around with a ball on an empty field. But this wouldbe doing something while pretending it to be something else, just as in the case inwhich one imagines to have ninety of the hundred miles completed and intends torun the remaining miles.

In the case of joint action, the sense of ability is therefore, in part, an interpersonalrelation. Now let us have a quick look at one of the most prominent analyses ofwhat it means to intend to do one’s part in a collective venture, in order to learnmore about how the interpersonal attitudes at work in the background of collectiveintentions are usually conceived of, and how this fits to our above considerationconcerning the role and structure of the sense of ability.

Here is Raimo Tuomela and Miller’s (1988) and Tuomela’s 2007) analysis ofwe-intention:

232 H.B. Schmid

(WI) A member A of a collective g we-intends to do X if and only if(i) A intends to do his part of X (as his part of X);

(ii) A has a belief to the effect that the joint action opportunities for an intentionalperformance of X will obtain (or at least probably will obtain), especially thata right number of the full-fledged and adequately informed members of g, asrequired for the performance of X, will (or at least probably will) performtheir parts of X, which under normal conditions will result in an intentionaljoint performance of X by the participants;

(iii) A believes that there is (or will be) a mutual belief among the participatingmembers of g (or at least among those participants who perform their parts ofX intentionally as their parts of X there is or will be a mutual belief) to theeffect that the joint action opportunities for an intentional performance of Xwill obtain (or at least probably will obtain);

(iv) (i) in part because of (ii) and (iii).

As is obvious from the quote, Tuomela agrees that we-intention requires some senseof collective ability. But he conceives of this attitude purely in terms of belief, andthe belief requirement is rather strong: as is evident from clauses ii and iii, whereTuomela mentions beliefs concerning the action opportunities and the contributionsof the other group members, A has to believe that they, together, will actually do thejoint action to which he or she intends to do his or her part.

Remember the reason mentioned above for rejecting Grice’s and Velleman’sclaim that in order to intend to ϕ individually one has to believe that one will ϕ:it is that intention is compatible with any degree of self-doubt, and that only theweakest version of the limitation claim seems plausible. The weakest version of thelimitation claim states that in order to intend to ϕ, an agent cannot believe that it isimpossible for him to ϕ. Now it seems plausible to assume that the same argumentcan be made in the collective case. In order to do one’s part in a collective venture,one does not have to assume that anything will come off it; any degree of (collec-tive) self-doubt is compatible with participatory intention, as long as it is self-doubt,and not certainty of inability.

The question, however, is: are the cases strictly parallel? Do beliefs concerningthe limits of one’s collective abilities exert a similar rational pressure on the rangeof one’s participatory intentions in the same way as they do on the formation onone’s purely individual action? Consider agent A in the following two situations.First, A intends to ϕ while believing that she is unable to ϕ (remember the examplesdiscussed above in Section 12.2). Second, A, as a member of group G, intends todo her part in G’s ϕ-ing while believing that G cannot ϕ. An example for this lattercase might be construed of Tuomela’s (1995, 235ff.) case of a group of people push-ing a broke-down bus. Assume that the group’s shared intention is to move the busout of the lane, that the bus is quite large, and that the group is very small, perhapsconsisting of just two persons. In this case, there is evidence for the participatingindividuals to believe that the bus cannot be moved out of the lane, even if theyact jointly. At first sight, it might seem that there are some differences between theindividual aiming at a subjectively impossible individual goal, and the individual


intending to do her part in what she takes to be a collective venture. The collectivecase, it might seem, isn’t subject to the same degree of irrationality as the individ-ual is. After all, A might just intend to do his part, i.e. to push as hard as he can(perhaps with the aim of not letting the other down, who isn’t convinced of theircollective inability, and still believes that they together can do it). Thus it seemsthat the agent’s beliefs concerning collective inability do not (rationally) limit theirparticipatory intention. But upon closer consideration, it becomes apparent that thisline of reasoning is wrong. If A’s intention is simply to push as hard as he can,he does not thereby intend to move the bus out of the lane together with the otherperson, but simply intends to do what would be her contribution to their collectiveaction, if that action were to come into being. In other words, he intends her part dere rather than de dicto. In his analysis of we-intention, however, Tuomela has madeit clear that for an individual to we-intend, she has to intend to do her part as herpart (cf. clause i. in the above analysis); for her to intend her contribution as herpart, however, she cannot believe that there is no whole to which her part is a part.In other words: if A intends to push, without assuming that she, together with theother group member, will thereby move the bus out of the lane, she is in the exactsame situation as BenjaminR, who makes an effort at the closed lid, but does notintend to open the jar.

Thus we have to distinguish cases in which people simply throw in their effortsindependently of what they expect to come off it from cases in which people gen-uinely share an intention and make their contribution. The first case is parallel toindividual tryings in terms of proper actions. The question to be addressed hereis: is it possible to share an intention (as opposed to simply throwing in one’sforces) while believing that the jointly intended action cannot possibly be carriedout?

I assume that anyone who has ever been involved in university administrationwill be quite familiar with that kind of experience. One does not have to believethat we will ϕ in order to intend to do one’s part of ϕ as one’s part, i.e. to share anintention. Indeed, the experience of taking part in a collective venture which one isconvinced is doomed to failure is even more frequent than the experience of intend-ing to so something one knows in one’s head one will not be able to carry out. Justas their individual parallels, such cases are, to some degree at least, irrational cases.They involve a degree of cognitive inconsistency, or of practical incoherence. Butas they are not conceptually impossible, an adequate analysis of collective inten-tionality should be able to accommodate such cases. This is obviously not the casein Tuomela’s analysis, because Tuomela demands of the participants in joint actionto believe that the collective action opportunities hold, and that they, together, willperform the action in question (cf. ii. and iii. in the analysis above).

If it is possible for agents to share an intention, which they believe to be impos-sible to carry out, the basic mode of how participants in joint action are interrelatedcannot simply be belief. They have to be interrelated in a way that leads them to takethemselves to be able to ϕ even against their beliefs concerning what they are ableto do. So what, then, is the basic mode of interpersonal relation at work in collectiveintention, if not belief?

234 H.B. Schmid

Let me just mention two features to be found in competing accounts of collectiveintentionality, which sound promising with regard to the issue at stake here (I willnot address the weaknesses of these accounts). Michael Bratman has emphasizedthat in joint action, the intentionality of the participants is intertwined in that eachsomehow “aims at the efficacy of the intention of the other” (1999, 124). “Aiming atthe efficacy” of another’s intention is obviously a different attitude from simply hav-ing a belief that the other will carry out his intention; it involves some commitmentto support, some disposition to make the other’s aim one’s own. Margaret Gilbert(1996) proposes a striking alternative to Tuomela’s account in claiming that thebasic attitudes towards the other participant’s actions are normative rather than cog-nitive. In her analysis, she claims that for two agents jointly to intend to ϕ it has tobe true that they are obliged to each other to perform their respective parts, and thatthey are entitled to rebuke the other if he fails to deliver. It has been pointed out (bySugden [2000], among others), that this requirement is too strong. There are manycases where agents act jointly, without there being proper obligations involved inthe case. But Gilbert seems to be right in pointing out that the inter-individual atti-tudes involved in joint action cannot be purely cognitive. So the question is: howare we to understand an attitude that is not purely cognitive, even though it involvescognitive elements, and not purely normative, even though there is some element ofnormativity involved?

Again, affectivity seems to offer a convincing alternative. I propose to conceiveof the basic mode of how agents relate to the other participant’s abilities in the sameway as they relate to their own in the individual case. I have argued above that thesense of one’s own abilities is basically affective; it is a matter of self-confidence,conceived of in affective terms so as to allow for the possibility of recalcitrance.Affective confidence is the attitude that determines the class of possible objects ofintentions, and serves as a basic guiding line for agency, the sense of reality, and thesense of self. Concerning the case of joint agency, I propose to see the basic inter-individual attitude involved as matter of trust, conceived of in affective terms. If trustis basic to joint action, and joint action is basic to sociality, this proposal assignstrust a fundamental role in the social world. Of course, this proposal goes beyondthe views to be found in most of the received literature on trust, where trust is oftenseen as a remedy against collective action problems rather than the stuff of whichsocial relations, as such, are made. But my proposal is not entirely idiosyncratic,either. It conjoins two received views in the literature on trust, combining MartinHollis’ (1998) insight that trust is the stuff of which even the most rudimentaryforms of interactions are made,5 with Karen Jones’ (1996) insight that trust shouldbe seen as an affective attitude.

To sum up: I have argued that some conceptual puzzles about the sense of abil-ity at work in the background of intention can be resolved if we conceive of it inaffective terms. Action requires not only volition and cognition, it also requires anaffective element. In order to form an intention, one has to feel up to its object. I

5This is a point taken up by Robert Sugden in his analysis of team trust (Sugden 2000).


have argued that the affective attitude at play here is basically a matter of self-trustand confidence, and that in collective action, interpersonal trust or confidence playsa similar role.

Acknowledgements I presented earlier versions of this paper on conferences and workshops atthe universities of Basel, Berkeley, and Bielefeld. I would like to thank the audiences there, andespecially Kevin Mulligan and Kirk Ludwig.

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Feeling Up to It - The Sense of Ability in the Phenomenology of Action (2011)

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