138 Paul Sheldon Davies
that cause the action. The emotion of authorship—the felt sense that one’s own intention
was the direct cause of one’s action—is produced by a system attuned to specifi c conscious
thoughts or perceptions. In particular, it is attuned to the co-occurrence of conscious
thoughts about doing action A and subsequent conscious perceptions of oneself doing A
(Wegner 2002). And yet, as Wegner’s experiments suggest, the mechanisms that in fact
cause us to perform action A belong to a distinct system of the mind, a system attuned to
various nonconscious inputs.^14 If that is correct, we must face the possibility that the feeling
of authorship sometimes causes us to conceptualize our selves as having acted freely when
in fact we did not. The concept “free action,” insofar as it is susceptible to such false posi-
tives, qualifi es as dubious by psychological role.
The same may be true of the concepts “purpose” and “design.” It is, at the very least,
a plausible hypothesis that we are endowed with entrenched capacities that control the
application of concepts clustering around the notions “purposive” or “end-directed,” and
that these capacities generate analogous constitutional confl icts. It thus is important that
we become self-conscious about the conditions under which such concepts may lead us
astray. We need a directive for inquiry to the following effect:
(P) For any concept dubious by psychological role, do not make it a condition of
adequacy on our philosophical theorizing that we preserve or otherwise “save” that
concept; rather, require that we identify the conditions (if any) under which the concept
is correctly applied and withhold antecedent authority from that concept under all
other conditions.
This, more than (D), is diffi cult to implement. It is diffi cult because the capacities engage
nonconsciously, because the capacities are entrenched and constitutive of the way we
orient ourselves to the world, and because the concepts, even when they reach the level
of conscious refl ection, are central to how we portray ourselves as agents. Implementing
(P) will require that we devise strategies for thinking our way around certain naturally
distorting dispositions of thought and feeling.
We must be prepared, moreover, to discover that we are ill equipped to withhold certain
concepts from our theoretical endeavors, our concept of “purpose” included. We must be
prepared to discover that we cannot help but employ certain concepts whenever we try to
understand the world. But we also must exercise due caution toward claims concerning
the allegedly essential constituents of human thought. Some concepts may indeed be
essential to our capacity to grasp the world, but the history of theology and philosophy
(Kant’s views included) should make us skeptical that we have discovered and correctly
described any such constituents. We should insist, at minimum, that we employ our most
reliable methods of inquiry when trying to discover the elements of cognition. And this
means employing the directives in (D), (P), and especially (E).