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Show Chapter IV. McClennen on Resolute Choice 178 choice. McClennen's psychology of choice is superior to mine in two important respects which I discuss in Sections 7 and 8, below. But overall, I (unsurprisingly) prefer my psychology of choice to his - not least of all because I think it accords better with his avowal that weakness of will can be understood as a "sign of imperfect rationality (PRR 236)." McClennen's concepts of commitment, regulation, and coordination are "thick," psychologically complex ones that presuppose my more basic, "thin" psychological notions of evaluation and memory. That is, in order to now carry out a commitment to act on a plan earlier adopted, or to coordinate a present choice with a previous one, an agent must be able to form and apply consistently through time the concept of the ranking superiority of the earlier plan, and so the concept of the ranking inferiority of the present, cyclical preference on which she is now disposed to act. Additionally, the agent must be able to remember the relation of the two alternatives she is presently ranking - the original plan to the cyclical one - to the third she is not - the threatened alternative of precommitment. Now we saw in Section 1 that McClennen cashes out the psychologically complex notion of commitment in terms of a more basic psychological disposition to follow the rule. But even a psychological disposition presupposes my yet more basic elements of evaluation and memory. In order to be overridingly disposed to do x rather than y or z, an agent must evaluate doing x as superior to doing y or z. He must also be able to form and apply consistently through time the concept of x's ranking superiority, and so the concept of y's and z's relative ranking inferiority. He must be able to remember the relation of x to y and z from - at the very least - the moment before the disposition is activated to - at the very least - the moment it is actualized. And if it is a real disposition to so behave, he must be able to do this not just on one occasion, but repeatedly, whenever the disposition is prompted. But satisfaction of my psychological requirements is not only a necessary condition of McClennen's. If the argument of Chapter III is valid, it is a sufficient condition as well: If an agent satisfies the conditions of conceptformation and application described in Chapter III.8.(a) and (b), then he is effectively disposed to coordinate his later choice with his earlier one as the concept of a genuine preference requires - and as McClennen's conception of rule-guided behavior requires. As McClennen rightly suggests, resolute choice requires an exercise not of will, resolve or commitment in the ordinary sense; but rather of reason. Reason is exercised when alternatives are consistently ranked and the consistency of that ranking through time is maintained, whether so doing maximizes utility or not; this is another example of the sense in which utility-maximization in the nonvacuous sense is a special case of, but not co-extensive with the more comprehensive, Kantian conception of rationality elaborated in Chapters II and III. Formally, © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
