Explicating Actions

Abstract

The description and explanation of human action are, in a good sense, the site of contending conceptions of science. There is no straightforward descriptive or explanatory literature about action that is essentially uncontested or so rigorously assembled that a would-be scientific psychology testing the prospect of covering laws for the entire domain would feel bound to accommodate its findings. On the contrary, the very propriety of attempting to formulate covering laws ranging over human action and the very question of what we might mean by the causal generation of action and the nature of psychological laws are issues of such a disputed sort that any such expectation would need to be considerably dampened. The only body of literature we have on human action is divided between a largely anecdotal ‘folk’ literature that is not, let it be said, inimical to the idea of causal regularity or socially or psychologically pertinent influence (as in studies of effective advertising, actuarial studies of insurance risks, realism in fiction, Freudian psychoanalysis and the like) and a largely physiologically oriented literature focused on what activates or facilitates bodily movements thought to be identical with or conceptually very closely related to what, more informally, we identify as human actions, or focused on theoretical informational connections coordinating sensory stimuli and behavioral change (as in eye and hand coordination within the range of cerebellar processes). All of the interesting questions about explicating actions pretty well remain at the conceptual level of characterizing action itself. This is not because the available studies are primitive, but because the very nature and import of a scientific psychology remain so strenuously contested even to the present moment.