Five Questions on the Philosophy of Actions: Some Replies (original) (raw)
Noûs, 1997
Some actions are "overt": they essentially involve agents' moving their bodies. Others are not: there are mental actions-for example, solving a chess problem in one's head, or deliberating about whether to accept a job offer. According to a popular view, actions are, essentially, events with a suitable causal history, a causal history featuring pertinent mental events or states. This view, if it is correct, helps both with a metaphysical issue and with an explanatory issue in the philosophy of mind. The metaphysical issue is how actions differ from nonactions. The explanatory issue is how actions are to be explained. On one popular view, they are to be explained-causally-partly in terms of such things as beliefs, desires, intentions, and associated mental events (e.g., acquiring an intention to A now). If actions essentially have such items as causes, this view of action-explanation has metaphysical underpinnings.
Philosophy in review, 2012
In one of his final published papers, Donald Davidson remarks: 'Since it is clear that the concept of action is central to many of the perennial concerns of philosophy, what is surprising is not Aristotle's interest, or ours, but rather the relative neglect of the subject during the intervening millennia… But whatever the reason, the consequence is that the subject has progressed, or changed, relatively little since Aristotle… Our topic has flourished, then, mainly in two periods: Aristotle's and our own' ("Aristotle's Action," Truth, Language and History [Clarendon Press, 2005], 277-8). The first three parts of A Companion to the Philosophy of Action-Part I, "Acts and Actions"; Part II, "Agency and Causation," and Part III, "Action in Special Contexts"testify to the efflorescence of work in the philosophy of action since the second half of the twentieth century. Part IV, "Prominent Figures," which, apart from an opening chapter on classical Indian philosophy, focuses on Western philosophers from Plato to Paul Ricoeur (no living philosophers are treated), might seem to challenge Davidson's historical claim. After limning the main topics treated in the first three parts of the volume, I treat Part IV, which constitutes nearly a third of the volume, at greatest length, and assess whether the historical chapters included there challenge Davidson's claim about the history of the philosophy of action.
Does Philosophy of Action Rest on a Mistake?
Metaphilosophy, 2001
Philosophers of action tend to take for granted the concept of basic actions-actions that are done at will, or directly-as opposed to others that are performed in other ways. This concept does foundational work in action theory; many theorists, especially causalists, take part of their task to be showing that normal, complex actions necessarily stem from basic ones somehow. The case for the concept of basic actions is driven by a family of observations and a cluster of closely related anti-infinite regress arguments. I review this case in the work of Arthur Danto, Donald Davidson, and Jennifer Hornsby-three of the most important developers of the concept-and find it lacking. I conclude by sketching the possibility of non-foundationalist action theory.
Two Dogmas of Contemporary Philosophy of Action
Davidson’s seminal essay “Actions, Reasons and Causes” brought about a paradigm shift in the philosophy of action. Before Davidson the consensus was that the fundamental task of the philosophy of action was to elucidate the concept of action and the concept of event. After Davidson it has been assumed that the fundamental challenge for the philosophy of action is to answer not the conceptual question “what does it mean to explain something as an action?”, but a metaphysical question, namely, “how is causal over-determination by the mental and the physical possible?” I argue that the two main considerations Davidson provides for construing the question posed by the action/event distinction in metaphysical rather than conceptual terms are inconclusive. To the extent that Davidson’s essay was responsible for this paradigm shift, contemporary philosophy of action may well be said to rest on two unexamined dogmas.
The Action-Theoretic Basis of Practical Philosophy
2007
In the philosophical tradition ever since Aristotle theory of action has been regarded as an essential and indispensable basis of the core disciplines of practical philosophy, which should explain, among others, how prudential rationality, moral behaviour, responsibility, freedom or autonomy are possible. We find such explicit action theory underpinnings of their respective ethics or theories of rationality in Aristotle, in Epicurus, in Stoic philosophy or later, in modern times in Locke, in Hume or, to a minor degree, in Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer to name only a few.
Libertarianism, Action Theory, and the Loci of Responsibility
Philosophical Studies, 2000
Libertarians with respect to moral responsibility -those who think that the freedom requisite for responsibility is incompatible with determinism and that we do sometimes act with this freedom -typically hold that what we are principally responsible for are certain mental actions, such as decisions, choices, volitions, or acts of willing or trying. Our responsibility for anything else -overt behavior, omissions, or the consequences of actions or omissions -is held to be indirect and derived from direct responsibility for one or more of these mental actions. 1 This is because, on this standard libertarian view, it is only with respect to mental actions, or to a subclass of them, that we are directly free; only with respect to them do we ever act with the variety of direct control that is the source of our moral responsibility. As one libertarian writes, it is 'mental acts such as deciding, choosing, undertaking, forming an intention' that 'for the libertarian constitute the basic loci of moral responsibility.' 2 The suggestion is that this view is not just a feature of some libertarian theories but something that all libertarians do or at least should hold. 3 There is a certain kind of theory of what constitutes an action that fits naturally with, and is often affirmed in conjunction with this view concerning the loci of responsibility. On that theory, every action is wholly, or has as a part, a mental action. An overt action such as my raising my arm is said to consist of a sequence of events, beginning with a mental action of deciding or willing or trying, and ending with my arm's rising; and it is the first of these events' causing the others in the sequence that makes this sequence of events an action. Many contemporary action theorists reject this view of the constitution of action and argue for a very different view, one on which,
Actions and outcomes: two aspects of agency
Synthese, 2007
Agency can be construed as both the manner in which autonomous individuals embark on particular courses of action (or inaction), and the relationship between such agents and the outcomes of the courses of action on which they embark. A promising strategy for understanding both senses of agency consists in the combination of a modal logic of agency and branching time semantics. Such is the strategy behind stit theory, the theory of agentive action developed by Nuel Belnap and others. However, stit theoretic evaluations of the agentive relationship between agents and outcomes that are uncertain-due to either the presence of indeterminism, or the possible intervention of other agents-yield counterintuitive results. This paper develops a pair of alternative operators (the "act" operators) for modeling agency with respect to uncertain outcomes. Unlike the stit-theoretic model, the act-theoretic model of agency with respect to a particular state of affairs does not require that the state of affairs be realized in every possible history. If the state of affairs in fact obtains in the actual history, and its obtaining was dependent on the agent's pursuing a particular course of action, then the agent is deemed agentive under act theory.
This dissertation mounts a defense of the claim, made by Elizabeth Anscombe in her monograph Intention, that when an agent is acting intentionally, he knows what he is intentionally doing immediately—without observation or inference. We can separate out three elements, which build on each other, in this claim: the agent is acting, is acting intentionally, and has knowledge of what he is doing. The progress of the dissertation roughly follows this rough division. The first two chapters are concerned with articulating what is at stake in the characterization of an agent as acting. Since someone can be doing something without its being the case that she will have done it, and the knowledge claim concerns the doing rather than the having done of an action, we should first of all investigate what is predicated of someone who is said to be underway toward an end. I begin in the first chapter at a further remove from intentional action, with an investigation of not necessarily agential process-claims in general; the second chapter begins the transition to acting intentionally be applying the considerations of the first to the agential context. The third and fourth chapters explicitly turn to acting intentionally. The third begins by addressing an argument meant to establish that intentional action is compatible with ignorance of what one is doing, and in doing so formulates a criterion for performing non-basic actions intentionally. The fourth chapter takes up teleologically basic actions and supplements the criterion of the third to give a sufficient and necessary condition on acting intentionally. The final pair of chapters addresses the knowledge element of the claim. In the fifth, I articulate the concern that the nature of action is such as to render it only knowable theoretically, and examine several theories that attempt to account for knowledge of action observationally or inferentially. This concern is viable in the context of the causal theory of action; in the sixth chapter, I endorse in its place a metaphysically modest teleological theory. With that in place, space is opened up for a neo-expressivist account of knowledge of intention in action, which, when combined with the results of the preceding chapters, redeems the knowledge claim.
Propositional Attitudes and Embodied Skills in the Philosophy of Action
European Journal of Philosophy, 2017
Propositionalism in the philosophy of action is the popular view that intentional actions are bodily movements caused and rationalized by certain 'internal' propositional attitude states that constitute the agent's perspective. I attack propositionalism's background claim that the genuinely mental/cognitive dimension of human action resides solely in some range of 'internal' agencyconferring representational states that causally trigger, and thus are always conceptually disentangle-able from, bodily activity itself. My opposing claim, following Ryle, Wittgenstein, and others, is that mentality and intentionality can be constitutively implicated in bodily actions themselves, as exercises of a distinctive form of embodied practical understanding. I attempt to show this by attending to the fine-grained contours of various skillful actions. It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating. Skill does not deliberate.-Aristotle, Physics, II.8, 199b26-8. The fact that I will an action consists in my performing the action, not in my doing something else which causes the action.-Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, 89. Contemporary philosophy of action is in the grip of a misleading picture of human agency. This picture is comprised of several dubious metaphysical claims concerning the nature of commonsense psychological concepts and how these concepts relate to, and rationally explain, our actions. The most fine-grained version of this orthodoxy, what I will call the 'propositional attitude theory of action', or 'propositionalism', for short, construes everyday psychologicalexplanatory discourse about intentions and reasons for action as referring to internal representational mental states-specifically, propositional attitudes-and then claims that actions are bodily motions represented and causally triggered by certain kinds of propositional attitude states. This paper challenges propositionalism's background claim that the intrinsically mental/intentional dimension of human action resides solely in some range of 'inner' representational states that causally trigger, and thus are always conceptually disentangle-able from, 'outer' bodily activity itself. I call this the 'gappy' view of the relation of mentality and bodily action. My opposing claim,
Philosophical Perspectives, 2012
In this paper, I want to argue that actions are processes, and not events. The view that actions are processes has, of course, been mooted before. 1 But despite what I regard as its immense plausibility, the suggestion has never really caught on. Debates in the philosophy of action and the free will area continue to be framed largely in terms of an event ontology 2-or else 'events and processes' are both mentioned, but in one breath, and without further clarification, so that the reader is left with the impression that nothing significant could possibly hang on the distinction. No serious concessions have really ever been made to the view that actions should be conceived of as processes rather than events. My suspicion is that this has been because no sufficiently radical understanding of the nature of processes and their distinctness from events has really been made available by the philosophers who have proffered the suggestion, so that the insistence that we think of actions as processes has appeared merely to be a minor tweak to the standard event-based view which could make no real difference to the philosophical issues at stake. Processes are often thought of, roughly speaking, as mere chains of events-and on this conception, it can indeed be hard to see why the distinction would make any serious difference to anything. The issue, if there is one, can sometimes seem to be about no more than temporal extension 3and of course, if processes were no more than long events (perhaps composed of a multiplicity of shorter ones), it might be right to suppose that nothing much could hang on the insistence that actions be thought of as processes. But there is a much better way to understand the event-process distinction, which is capable of grounding a more serious change to the ontology of philosophy of action. In this paper, I want to try to explain how to arrive at this more radical understanding, to show why the new ontology is needed in the philosophy of action and to say a little, at the very end, about what sort of work it might conceivably do. Roughly speaking, the paper will have two halves, one negative, and one positive. I shall begin, in section (i), by offering some reasons for thinking that the things that it is most plausible to suppose we are trying to cotton on to with