At the philosophy panel talk “From Perception to Action: Intelligent Action in the Absence of the Intellect” hosted at Swarthmore College on Monday, Feb. 3, Sofia Berinstein, a graduate student from the University of Pittsburgh, presented her theory on sensual actions, challenging the conventional interpretations of motivation. Berinstein’s work encourages a reevaluation of everyday, sensual-based actions, such as outfit and meal choices. In these cases, Berinstein argues that the motivational cause may be credited to direct perceptual apprehension rather than practical inferences based on rational cognition.
Berinstein’s argument solves a problem for the standard neo-Humean theory, a popular framework contending that human actions are driven by the interplay between beliefs and desires. “Consider the action of buying a donut: You have the belief that the donut shop is open, and you also have the urge to eat a donut. What desires do is specify the end of the action and provide the ‘oomph’ to get there, while the beliefs give you a map of reality that is needed to locate the means to that end,” she explained.
This model, however, sometimes fails to account for sensual actions.
“The ‘machinery’ behind the standard theory is a practical inference that can be represented as an act of practical cognition: If I want to achieve X, and I think that action Y will bring about X, then I conclude that I should do Y,” Berinstein noted. “But for actions that epitomize the sensual domains—actions like making the next mark in a painting, choosing a certain outfit, deciding what to eat for breakfast, or embracing a loved one—they seem to lack syllogistic structure in the same manner that other actions have, and they don’t seem to be based on practical inferences.” Again, Berinstein brought up the donut example: “Maybe you ate a donut but didn’t actually come into the shop with a desire for a donut per se. Practical inference fails when your action seems to have been evoked by the present and the availability of donuts.”
The difficulty of modeling reasoning in practical syllogisms led Berinstein to propose an alternative view of sensual actions: to consider perception, rather than thought, as the source of motivation, allowing humans to move directly from perception to action without the need for practical inference.
“With actions that epitomize the sensual domains, we are often ‘feeling out’ what to do. When we choose what to eat, we may look at the donut case without any sort of expectation and simply feel out, from all the different donuts, what would be tasty. And as it turns out, we’re often right about what would be tasty for us,” Berinstein noted.
Berinstein argued that affective character is laden with contingent information about the world, as well as information about the evaluative significance of those facts, thereby relating us to both facts and values. In her theory, perception is possibly inherently motivating for actions by being affected by pleasant or painful valence. “The affective character of perception discloses the value of an object relative to a perceiver. For example, the painful valence of touching a hot pan tells us that the heat of the pan is dangerous, while the pleasant valence of Starry Night reflects its aesthetic value,” she explained.
In this sense, Berinstein’s perception-based model bypasses the problem with the standard theory of the improbable integration of beliefs and desires in sensual actions; rather, there’s no combination needed in her theory: “Affective perceptions encode both the descriptive and the evaluative together in a way that they’re already sensibly combined,” she concluded.
