Howard Darmstadter writes,
We have two different ways of explaining events. One way relies on material factors and physical laws: “The water boiled (or the meat cooked) because the flame heated it.” The second way relies on beliefs, wants, and other psychological traits: “He crossed the road because he wanted to get to the other side.”
We generally favor the psychological mode to explain human actions, and the material mode to explain inanimate events. It’s usually problematic to propose a psychological explanation for a material event, as when pre-scientific peoples explain a violent storm as caused by an angry god. It’s an error we can still be prone to: I stub my toe on a table leg, and for a moment I’m angry at the table. A more insidious misuse of psychological explanation is to see events that result from the uncoordinated actions of many individuals on the model of the consciously planned actions of a single person.
To put this in my own words: we can think of causes as material or intentional. A material cause is a historical impetus that pushes from the past. An intentional cause is a goal that pulls from the future. We can say that the car stopped because of a series of physical events. Or we can say that the car stopped because the driver made a plan to stop it.
The field of economics struggles with which of these causal frameworks to use. Most economists try to use the material framework. But human intentions constantly intrude. Social norms, institutional practices, and widely-held beliefs are non-material factors that affect economic outcomes.
–“The field of economics struggles with which of these causal frameworks to use. Most economists try to use the material framework. But human intentions constantly intrude. Social norms, institutional practices, and widely-held beliefs are non-material factors that affect economic outcomes.”–
Once again, we see the rotten fruit of the desire to eliminate formal and final causality from our description of the world several centuries ago. Economists are just being good moderns in using mathematical approaches and only focusing on material and efficient causes.
I explored this idea a while back, and elaborated on how really it’s all material causes, but the “intentional cause” can be thought of as a kind of abbreviation.
https://patrickdfarley.com/why-part-1/
Terms like ‘intended’ effect and ‘purpose’ seem to be other ways to express the concept of final causality.
“Social norms, institutional practices, and widely-held beliefs are non-material factors that affect economic outcomes.”
I will theorize – and I believe rightly so – that you can predict more accurately future outcomes and causality looking back from your arrival point by paying attention to culture and institutional practice than just about any other factor. As a matter of fact, I use such a theory in explaining what’s going on in this country as we speak.
The linked author, Howard Darmstadter, comes at the polarization issue from the Left though he blindly imagines he is being neutral. The comments to the linked piece (at Quillette) demolish Darmstadter by showing that his analysis applies in spades to the establishment Left, and that his characterizations of what is “extreme” are tendentious. Well worth reading together with the comments there.
Arnold, you would appreciate reading Dennett on his intentional stance framework. He actually uses three modes – the physical stance (movement of particles, physical processes) the engineering stance (computers, machines, etc) and the intentional stance (agents like us, birds, etc). He worked this out in detail in 89.
The Intentional Stance (A Bradford Book) https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0262540533/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_RMGN29RSRGTQFEKSM2KR
Yes, this was helpful: https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/intentionalsystems.pdf