Reasons and Causes

Donald Davidson established causalism, i.e. the view that reasons are causes and that action explanation is causal explanation, as the dominant view within contemporary action theory. According to his "master argument", we must distinguish between reasons the agent merely has and reasons she has and which actually explain what she did, and the only, or at any rate the best, way to make the distinction is by saying that the reasons for which an agent acts are causes of her action. "Davidson's challenge" to non-causalists is to come up with an alternative, more convincing, way of drawing the distinction. In this paper, I argue that G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright offer such an alternative. Moreover, I argue that Davidson's own account of interpretation makes no use of his causalist claim.

The traditional split between rationality and historicity, concept and intuition, the form and content of knowledge has brought about an inappropriate approaching to humanities and social sciences. Presenting the main effects of such split, this paper aims at arguing the need to ...

Many analytic philosophers of mind take for granted a certain (broadly Humean) conception of causality. Assumptions deriving from that conception are in place when they problematize what they call mental causation or argue for physicalism in respect of the mental. I claim that a different (broadly Aristotelian) conception of causality is needed for understanding many ordinary causal truths about things which act, including truths about human, minded beings — sc. rational beings who lead lives.

This is an author-produced version of a paper published in The philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by Lewis E. Hahn (ISBN 0-8126-9399-X. This version has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof corrections, published layout or pagination.

In this essay I ague that the mainstream ‘Standard Story’ of action – according to which actions are bodily motions with the right internal mental states as their causal triggers (e.g., ‘belief-desire-pairs’, ‘intentions’) – gives rise to a deeply problematic conception of inter-subjective action-understanding. For the Standard Story, since motivating reasons are internal mental states and bodily motions are not intrinsically intentional, an observer must ascribe internal states to others to make rational sense of their outwardly observable bodily motions. I argue this is both phenomenologically distorted and requires, on pain of infinite regress, a deeper, non-inferential, practical-perceptual form of understanding: ‘knowledge-how’, in a broadly Rylean sense. Recognizing the irreducible role of practical-perceptual knowledge-how in inter-subjective understanding, I argue, undermines core assumptions of the Standard Story concerning what an agent can directly perceive in interacting...

This paper engages critically with the thesis according to which Wittgenstein in On Certainty propounded a highly original form of epistemological foundationalism. It starts by briefly presenting Avrum Stroll's version of the thesis and goes on to discuss Michael Williams' criticism of it. It argues that, while instructive, Williams' objections are mainly terminological and do not provide a conclusive argument. Moreover, they hinge on an unfair reconstruction of Stroll's position. In the second half, it presents a more substantial criticism of the foundationalist interpretation, arguing that (i) it fails to take into account the undeniable holistic strand in On Certainty, and (ii) it misunderstands Wittgenstein as being engaged in a project of justification of our knowledge. It concludes that Wittgenstein's last notes do not commit him to any form of foundationalism.

The Philosophy of Action: An Anthology is an authoritative collection of key work by top scholars, arranged thematically and accompanied by expert introductions written by the editors. This unique collection brings together a selection of the most influential essays from the 1960s to the present day. • An invaluable collection that brings together a selection of the most important classic and contemporary articles in philosophy of action, from the 1960’s to the present day • No other broad-ranging and detailed coverage of this kind currently exists in the field • Each themed section opens with a synoptic introduction and includes a comprehensive further reading list to guide students • Includes sections on action and agency, willing and trying, intention and intentional action, acting for a reason, the explanation of action, and free agency and responsibility • Written and organised in a style that allows it to be used as a primary teaching resource in its own right

We conceive of ourselves as beings capable of acting in response to normative reasons. Given that our normative reasons are usually facts, this self-conception entails that we are capable of acting in response to facts. Arguments from error cases might seem to force us to deflate that self-conception, for they seem to show that to act in light of a fact must simply be a way of acting in light of a belief. The goal of this article is to argue against this deflationary view. I offer a counterexample to it and argue that in order to reject the argument from error on which it is grounded we should adopt a disjunctive view of acting in light of a consideration. According to this view there are two subjectively indistinguishable but distinct ways of acting in light of a consideration: acting in light of a fact and acting in light of a belief. This view allows us to take seriously the idea that our motivating reasons can be identical to facts and not mere true considerations and thus to take seriously our self-conception as beings that respond to and are capable of being moved by normative reasons for action.

We make how a person acts intelligible by revealing it as rational in the light of what she perceives, thinks, wants and so on. For example, we might explain that she reached out and picked up a glass because she was thirsty and saw that it contained water. In doing this, we are giving a causal explanation of her behaviour in terms of her antecedent beliefs, desires

Philosophers pursued different strategies to determine the nature of explanatory reasons for actions. Explanatory reasons were analyzed as obtaining or non-obtaining states of affairs, or as the agent’s beliefs. In this paper, I will show that neither of these strategies works properly; a new approach is needed. I will argue that all explanatory reasons have an essentially hybrid nature. They are entities that both involve explanatory-relevant objects in the world that the agent represented, as well as the agent’s representation of them.

This work addresses biological explanations and aims to provide a philosophical account which brings together logical-procedural and historical-processual aspects when considering molecular pathways. It is argued that, having molecular features as explananda, a particular non-classical logical language-Zsyntaxcan be used to formally represent, in terms of logical theorems, types of molecular processes (pathways), and to grasp how we get from one molecular interaction to another, hence explaining why a given outcome occurs. Expressing types of molecular biology processes in terms of the Zsyntax language allows us to represent causal interactions by taking into account their context-sensitivity, and amounts to partly reviving the spirit of the so-called received view of explanationwhich aimed to capture scientific explanatory accounts in terms of their logical structure and their appealing to nomological relations. Such a partial revival is pursued by invoking here non-classical deductions and empirical generalisations, which are called to provide the epistemic norms to explain the behavior of molecular pathways.

It is possible to disagree on nearly everything when it comes to human agency. Nonetheless, certain things are written in stone. One thinks. One acts. One makes mistakes. My focus in this dissertation is on these three simple facts and the relation between them. I am fascinated by the different roles that knowledge plays with each: that is, the kind of knowledge one has of thoughts, actions, and mistakes. What can one know about the thoughts, actions, and mistakes of others, and how? How does one come to have knowledge about one’s own?

s (but similar results would be obtained by considering the first 10 or the first 100 of the list as well), we find the prevalence of words such as “theory”, “argument”, “result”, “consequence”, problem”, “solution”, “account”, and so forth, whereas the Wittgensteinian visualization chart presents a different configuration and a different set of frequently used words. We would like to suggest that the presence (and the absence) of this semantic pattern refers to the presence (and the absence) of a science-oriented philosophical style and metaphilosophy. Since we think that a scienceoriented philosophical style should be conceived of as part of a process of academic and scientific legitimation, the main thesis of our contribution is that the index of academic success for PhD candidates in US philosophy departments in the last 40 years is quite strictly connected to the choice of a more or less science-oriented philosophical style and metaphilosophy. Such a contention, suggested by th...

Is there a distinction in method between quantitative and qualitative sociology? If so, which kind is better? Philosophers and sociologists have debated these questions for a long time; and among philosophers, at least, they are by no means resolved. I wish to examine the alleged ...

The paper argues that the nature of commonsense psychological explanation as a special kind of causal explanation in which events are made intelligible as being "reasonable from the subject's point of view" undermines the orthodox attempt to reconcile the causal efficacy of the mind with the existence of physical explanations of all of a person's physical movements. Given their radically different guiding principles, it is implausible to expect both the physical and the psychological explanatory schemes to identify the very same explanatory units and interconnected webs of causal explanatory events. I propose and develop an analogue of Wiggins' conceptualist realism for the events which are brought to light by each of these explanatory projects; and I explain why this is perfectly compatible with the existence of physical explanations of all physical events.

The causal theory of action which Professor Donald Davidson has elaborated over the last few years at present faces a kind of counterexample which he admits proves his theory to be inadequate. 1 Davidson has argued 2 that a person's behaviour is an action if (1) there is ...

From the very beginning of hinge epistemology, its advocates have noted certain similarities between Wittgenstein’s thought and that of Hume. They have also, however, accused Hume of ultimately remaining too sceptical and too metaphysical to be enlisted to the cause. I have defended Hume against the second charge
elsewhere. Here, I wish to focus on his epistemology and, more particularly, his account of justification. I shall argue that Hume’s account of how justification comes to an
end is proto-Wittgenstein in numerous respects. It is anti-sceptical without being rationalistic; it is accompanied by an account of how explanation comes to an end that places human practices and the animal behaviour that they grow  from at its centre; it is an early form of hinge epistemology. The first part of this essay is devoted to showing the Hume is a hinge epistemologist. The second half considers what kind of hinge epistemologist he is. The third and final part looks at what contemporary hinge epistemologists can learn from Hume.

What is the role of practical thought in determining the intentional action that is performed? Donald Davidson’s influential answer to this question is that thought plays an efficient-causal role: intentional actions are those events that have the correct causal pedigree in the agent's beliefs and desires. But the Causal Theory of Action has always been plagued with the problem of “deviant causal chains,” in which the right action is caused by the right mental state but in the wrong way. This paper addresses an alternative approach to understanding intentional action inspired by G.E.M. Anscombe, interpreting that view as casting practical thought in the role of formal rather than efficient cause of action and thereby avoiding the problem of deviant (efficient) causal chains. Specifically, on the neo-Anscombean view, it is the agent’s “practical knowledge” – non-observational, non-inferential knowledge of what one is doing – that confers the form of intentional action on an event...

Among philosophical questions about human agency, one can distinguish in a rough and ready way between those that arise in philosophy of mind and those that arise in ethics. In philosophy of mind, one central aim has been to account for the place of agents in a world whose operations are supposedly ‘physical’. In ethics, one central aim has been to account for the connexion between ethical species of normativity and the distinctive deliberative and practical capacities of human beings. Ethics then is involved with questions of moral psychology whose answers admit a kind of richness in the life of human beings from which the philosophy of mind may ordinarily prescind. Philosophy of mind, insofar as it treats the phenomenon of agency as one facet of the phenomenon of mentality, has been more concerned with how there can be ‘mental causation’ than with any details of a story of human motivation or of the place of evaluative commitments within such a story.

What kind of activity are non-human animals capable of? A venerable tradition insists that lack of language confines them to 'mere behaviour'. This article engages with this 'lingualism' by developing a positive, bottom-up case for the possibility of animal agency. Higher animals cannot just act, they can act intelligently, rationally, intentionally and for reasons. In developing this case I draw on the interplay of behaviour, cognition and conation, the unduly neglected notion of intelligence and its connection to rationality, the need to recognize that reasons are objective conditions, and the difference between the ability to act for reasons and the capacity to reflect on reasons.

A central idea in Anscombe's philosophy of action is that of practical knowledge, the formally distinctive knowledge a person has of what she is intentionally doing. Anscombe also discusses 'practical truth', an idea she borrows from Aristotle, and which on her interpretation is a kind of truth whose bearer is not thought or language, but action. What is the relationship between practical knowledge and practical truth? What we might call the 'Simple View' of this relationship holds that practical knowledge is essentially knowledge of practical truth. But the Simple View isn't obviously available, since we have practical knowledge of all of our intentional actions, whereas an action manifests practical truth in Aristotle's sense only if it is a case of doing or living well. I suggest that we distinguish a thicker ethical version and a thinner action-theoretical version of each notion. This allows us to maintain a - complex - version of the Simple View, on which practical knowledge in the thick ethical sense is knowledge of practical truth in the thick ethical sense, and practical knowledge in the thin action-theoretical sense is knowledge of practical truth in the thin action-theoretical sense. Although Anscombe did not make these distinctions explicitly, I argue that she nevertheless commits herself to them in her discussion.