Wanting and Intending by Neil Roughley

Author:Neil Roughley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

7.1.3 Pervasion

A final form of strength that can be predicated of intentions as of other wants* is the extent of the attitude’s influence on a person’s thought and perceptual processes. Like other wants* (Sect. 3.​2), intentions can leave traces in more extended or restricted spheres of a person’s action and non-agential behaviour.

Perceptual Salience

A non-agential feature of the optative syndrome that lends itself to comparison with corresponding symptoms of intending concerns perceptual salience and what psychologists call the “accessibility” of thought contents: wanting* some p generally increases the probability that one will have thoughts about or perceive p, or states of affairs conducive to bringing p about, be sensitive to indications that p has come to pass and to lexical items associated with p.

One way of approaching the specificity of intending’s effects on perception and thought is via a comparison of the effects exerted by “needs”, “desires” and “values”,11 as reported in the older studies of Bruner, Postman and associates (cf. Sect. 3.​2.​2), with corresponding features of the “implemental mind set” focussed on in the “Rubicon model” of action phases (cf. Sect. 6.​4.​1).12 Of course, because the two groups of studies are not designed to permit comparison, there are limits to what conclusions can be drawn. Nevertheless, it is worth describing the main points of similarity and dissimilarity between their results. Placing the studies side by side provides support for the view that decisionally formed intentions share certain perceptually relevant causal characteristics with other optative attitudes, whilst also unfolding their own specific kinds of effects.

Both strongly “desiring”, “needing” or “valuing” some item and decisionally intending some action tend to increase the speed of recognition or extent of recall of the relevant items (Bruner and Postman 1947/48, 75ff.; Postman et al. 1948, 150f.; Postman and Leytham 1950/51, 398ff.; Beckmann and Gollwitzer 1987, 276ff.). It seems, then, that both kinds of pro-attitude lead to forms of epistemic bias. This first rough parallel, which suggests treating the salience effects of deciding as specific variants of the corresponding feature of the optative syndrome, may seem to be in tension with the way the relationship between the first two phases of the “Rubicon model” is interpreted by its advocates. According to Heckhausen and Gollwitzer, the predecisional “mind set” is characterised by “impartiality”, “open-mindedness” and “realism” relative to the options, a perspective they contrast with the postdecisional orientation, in which agents become “narrow-minded partisans of their plans of action” (Heckhausen and Gollwitzer 1987, 103; Gollwitzer 1990, 65; Gollwitzer 2003, 264). However, the “impartiality” in the “deliberative” phase concerns the way deliberation is carried on, not how salient the options are in the first place. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that entering into deliberation about some wanted* option could have effects on how that option is “seen”, since beginning to deliberate about something involves a step back from the flow of action, suspending its immediate motivational effects. It would be interesting to know whether the salience effects of certain wants* – for money, for food – taken in isolation (Bruner and Goodman 1947, 49f.

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