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Typically, psychologists define procrastination as a gap between intention and action. Have you experienced that gap? Did it look more like the Grand Canyon? How do you get across this gap?
For the most part, my blog has been a summary of psychological studies that speak to the gap between intention and action; an irrational state that we call procrastination. Yet, as much as it's common for psychologists to say that procrastination is an intention-action gap, we don't say much about the gap itself or about the nature of our irrationality.
Fortunately, the philosopher John Searle has lots to say about this gap and rationality. In his book, Rationality in Action (2001, MIT Press), he explains that this gap is absolutely necessary for us to understand what rationality is and what it does. He writes, ". . . . unless I presuppose that there is a gap, I cannot get started with the process of rational decision making." (p. 13).
There isn't always a gap. We're not always rational. Take the example of a drug addict with the overpowering need for the drug. There isn't a gap between the desires-beliefs and the action. The addict desires the heroin, sees a substance that he believes is heroin and ingests it. The desire and belief are sufficient to determine action. However, as Searle explains, this is hardly the model of rationality.
There are many other actions that we can understand this way. Compulsive behaviors and deeply ingrained habits are not what we might call voluntary action or rational. My focus is on voluntary action, as we define procrastination as the voluntary delay of an intended act despite knowing that there is a potential for negative consequences. In other words, I voluntarily delay my action despite knowing I'll probably be worse off. This is the self-defeating choice of procrastination.
When we consider our everyday voluntary action, we have to presuppose that our antecedent desires and beliefs are not causally sufficient to determine action. We must deliberate on our choices and decide what to do.
We all experience this daily. It may even be an experience in relation to reading this blog. You may read the studies and the strategies offered by various psychologists. You may desire the happiness or well-being espoused in each blog. You may believe that the strategies are effective. However, these desires and beliefs don't lead you to act on them. This is the gap.
Searle writes, ". . . the gap is that feature of our conscious decision making and acting where we sense alternative future decisions and actions as causally open to us" (p. 62). He continues by explaining that there is a gap when our beliefs, desires or other reasons for action are not experienced as causally sufficient to form an intention or when a prior intention does not actually lead to an intentional action. So, what we believe or our desires or even our reasons for actions won't cause our action. They are not sufficient to cause intentional action. This is the gap.
I think we all wished that our beliefs, desires, commitments, obligations and other reasons were causally sufficient to motivate voluntary action in our lives. The thing is, they're not (and if they were, it might remove what we think of as "voluntary").
We certainly know this in our lived experience. We have good reasons to do a task, we may believe that completing this task now will be one more step towards a longer-term desire (finish my degree, get a better job, improve my relationship), but still we don't do it. What in the world is wrong with us? Why this weakness of will?
Searle writes that ". . . no matter how perfectly you structure the antecedents of your action, weakness of will is always possible. . . . Weakness of will arises simply from the fact that at any point the gap provides an indefinitely large range of choices open to me and some of them will seem attractive even if I have already made up my mind to refuse them . . .the causes still do not set sufficient conditions, and this opens the way for weakness of will" (p. 25).
What fills this darn gap? If it's not simply setting up the "right" reasons, how can I make a prior intention and stick to it while avoiding temptation?
Practical reason
It's practical reason, the focus of Searle's writing in this book, that has the task of finding some way to adjudicate between our various reasons, desires, possibilities. And, this practical reason is the self deliberating and choosing.
Yes, there is this irreducible notion of self in Searle's reasoning. It's the self that experiences this apparent freedom of choice in the possible. I could do this, I could do that, I could do this other thing . . . the gap. "This gap has a traditional name. It is called ‘the freedom of will'" (p. 13).
At the heart of this is a very special notion of agency. We are agentic. We are special entities, unlike many other animals with whom we share a great deal biologically, in that we consciously try to do things. It is this self that "operates in the gap on the basis of reasons to make decisions and perform actions, it is the locus of responsibility" (p. 89). It is us, as free agents, acting rationally to make a decision, because it is this rationality that must make a difference beyond what we would do by instinct or in an unconscious response to a stimulus. Our agency, our free choice, our deliberation are adaptive to us.
We deliberate. Once we have assembled our reasons, our desires, our beliefs, we have to deliberate to reach a decision. "Most of the difficulty of rational deliberation is to decide what you really want, and what you really want to do. You cannot assume that the set of wants is well ordered prior to deliberation" (p. 125). We deliberate in the gap.
Yes, our rationality operates in this gap. In the face of irrationality we deliberate and choose. "The scope of that choice is the gap in question. . . Nothing fills the gap: you make up your mind to do something, or you just haul off and do what you are going to do, or you carry out the decision you previously made, or you keep going, or you fail to keep going, in some project that you have undertaken" (p. 17).
This is human rationality. As Searle writes, "The subject matter of rationality is not formal argument structures much less is it marginal utility and indifference curves. The central topic of discussion in a theory of rationality is the activity of human beings . . . selves, engaged in the process of reasoning. . . the subject matter of the philosophy of rationality is the activity of reasoning, a goal-directed activity of conscious selves (pp. 95-96).
This perspective on rationality is also the focus of a psychology of procrastination. It's the psychology of the gap, of understanding how it is we deliberate and carry out the intention we previously made.
So, let's not run from the gap. It is where our rationality operates. It is a basic element of being human, and we risk losing our own freedom and responsibility if we try to deny the gap believing that if we can only find the right reason, the maximum utility, that we'll act then without even trying. As Mark White might say, perhaps you have to just try a little harder!
