Cause and Reason

Abstract

Having found, in avowals and performatives, an irruption into the natural world by human agents that must be incompletely determined, if its author is to have incorrigible authority, the question arises: does this entail that human actions are causally undetermined as well, and, if so, are they therefore inexplicable?¹ Our answer to the first question will be affirmative and our answer to the second negative. I suspect that the aversion most philosophers have to indeterminism is due to their mistaken fear that it entails an affirmative answer to the second question. I shall try to allay that fear.

‘But why do you say that we felt a causal connexion? … One might rather say, I feel that the letters are the reason why I read such-and-such. For if someone asks me “Why do you read such-and-such?” — I justify my reading by the letters which are there’ — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations