Abstract
The great revival of interest among analytic philosophers in questions about action stems largely from the work of Wittgenstein, who set forth a number of powerful considerations against a causal theory of action. Because of this that theory has been on the defensive, and the sheer bulk of papers criticizing it made it seem in full retreat. The tide has turned recently, and the causal theory is no longer on the defensive. Some of the criticisms have been shown to be mistaken, and others have been turned aside by more subtle developments of the theory. Another reason the theory has regained its status is that its opponents, though they made cogent criticisms, failed to develop a cogent alternative, and the causal theory was given the benefit of the doubt, not so much because it could answer the criticisms but because it was believed that it had to be right, there being no reasonable alternative.
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Notes
Members of the Northfield Noumenal Society read this paper and discussed it with me. I am grateful to them, as well as to Tom Carson, O.R. Jones, Raimo Tuomela and G. H. von Wright for helpful suggestions and for pointing out some mistakes; I’ll take responsibility for the mistakes that remain. St. Olaf College deserves thanks for enabling me to get to the Colloquim in Helsinki.
‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ in Care and Landesman, eds., Readings in the Theory of Action, Bloomington, 1968; ‘Agency’ in Binkley et al., eds., Agent, Action, and Reason, Toronto, 1971; ‘How is Weakness of the Will Possible?’ in J. Feinberg, ed., Moral Concepts, Oxford, 1969; ‘Freedom to Act’ in T. Honderich, ed., Essays on Freedom of Action, London, 1973.
Especially noteworthy is Alvin Goldman, A Theory of Human Action, Englewood Cliffs, 1970.
I have discussed the question of the conditions of the possibility of action at some length in ‘Von Wright’s Theory of Action’, forthcoming in The Philosophy of Georg Henrik von Wright, ed. by Paul A. Schilpp.
‘Freedom to Act’, p. 145. Cf. ‘Agency’, p. 7: “A man is the agent of an act if what he does can be described under an aspect that makes it intentional.”
Goldman argues for the latter thesis in A Theory of Human Action, pp. 10ff.
Cf. G. H. von Wright, Norm and Action, London, 1963, pp. 39ff.
There are difficulties with this distinction, which cannot be resolved without raising the ontological issues I have set aside. It has, for example, the consequence of making every act intentional, which is no difficulty if one adopts a Davidsonian ontology so that every act is intentional under some description. Given this ontology we can make the same point by saying that every act has an intention in it whose object is the result of the act, so that when we specify what an agent did intentionally we specify the result of his act, and when we specify what he did non-intentionally we specify the consequences of his act. Where Davidson says that S acted intentionally under description c but not under description d, we can say that c was the result of S’s act but that d was a consequence.
Cf. Norm and Action, p. 41f.
‘On So-called Practical Inference’, Acta Sociologica 15 (1971), p. 49.
Explanation and Understanding, Ithaca, 1971, p. 115.
‘On So-Called Practical Inference’, p. 51.
These qualifications are discussed in Explanation and Understanding, pp. 104-107, and in ‘On So-Called Practical Inference’, pp. 47-49. The latter paper is particularly helpful in the way it discusses the kinds of uses to which the scheme of P.I. may be put. It may be used for explanation, or for prediction, or for setting the conditions in terms of which to understand an agent’s behavior as an intentional act. The qualifications required to make the scheme valid will vary with the use to which it is put. It should be noted that von Wright has recently (in unpublished writings) changed his mind about the status of the P.I., no longer thinking it is logically valid, even with the qualifications referred to above. He continues to hold, however, that it is in no sense a causal inference. This means that while von Wright would no longer accept some of the arguments stated here, he would accept the basic conclusion, and that is what is crucial for my purposes.
Cf. Thomas Reid’s procedure in his analysis of the concept of conceiving. This, he says, is one of those “simple operations of the mind [which] cannot be logically defined” His task, therefore, is not to discover its simpler elements but “to explain some of its properties, consider the theories about it; and take notice of some mistakes of philosophers concerning it”. (Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay IV, chap. I.)
For yon Wright’s account of teleological explanation see Explanation and Understanding, pp. 84 ff.
‘On So-Called Practical Inference’, p. 50.
Explanation and Understanding, p. 121.
In one (important) sense of “could have done otherwise”, therefore, I may do an act intentionally even if I could not have done otherwise. Cf. Luther’s, “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise”.
‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, p. 179.
Ibid., p. 182.
‘How is Weakness of the Will Possible?’ p. 102.
Cf. above, p. 278.
Cf. von Wright’s discussion in Explanation and Understanding, chap. I, esp. pp. 23ff.
‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, p. 194.
‘Mental Events’, in Foster and Swanson, eds., Experience and Theory, Amherst, 1970, p. 89.
‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, p. 195.
Ibid., p. 188. Davidson has Melden in mind particularly.
Cf. ibid: “In order to turn the first ‘and’ to ‘because’ in ‘He exercised and he wanted to reduce and thought exercise would do it’ we must… [hold that a] reason for an action is its cause”.
Roderick Chisholm, ‘Freedom and Action’ in K. Lehrer, ed., Freedom and Determinism, New York, 1966, p. 30.
Jerome Shaffer, Philosophy of Mind, Englewood Cliffs, 1968, p. 105.
‘Freedom to Act’, p. 153. Davidson is paraphrasing an unpublished paper of David Armstrong’s.
Shaffer’s condition would rule out the killing’s being intentional but it would not rule out the swerving’s being intentional (as it surely is not) since it was not necessary to employ means to swerve the car.
This way of putting it is misleading in the sense that I do not mean that acting on a desire requires that there exists some linguistic scheme; I mean that there exist the beliefs, intentions, etc., which such a scheme would formulate.
‘Freedom to Act’, p. 153.
Omitting “with the intention of drinking a glass of water”, which, if not trivial, may be false and hence cannot be read off. It is not true that whenever I act intentionally there is some intention with which I perform the act, unless one just makes ‘acting with some intention’ synonymous with ‘acting intentionally’.
‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, p. 190.
Freedom to Act’, p. 147.
That ‘pro attitude’ can be used to do the job of ‘intention’ is helped by the fact that the major pro attitude term, namely ‘want’, can be used synonymously with ‘intend’, as, for example, when Davidson writes that, “… When we know some action is intentional, it is empty to add that the agent wanted to do it”. (‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, p. 182) That this statement will normally be taken to be true shows that ‘wanted’ here means ‘intended’ not ‘desired’. For if it means ‘desired’, the statement is false, since agents may do an act intentionally even if they desire not to do it (e.g., dismiss a friend from the company at the direction of one’s superior). But from the fact that one wants to do an act in the sense of desires to do it, it does not follow that one wants to do it in the sense of intends to do it. Under what conditions an agent who has a pro attitude acquires an intention to satisfy it is a large topic on which I shall say nothing. It is in that nexus where many of the problems of practical reasoning belong — reasoning which leads to decisions about whether and when to act on one’s pro attitudes.
Richard Taylor, Action and Purpose, Englewood Cliffs, 1966, p. 252.
Cf. above p.273f.
‘Could’ in this conditional does not refer to S’s ability to move his hand, for his wanting to move it is hardly a sufficient condition for his having that ability. ‘Could’ here is rather being used in what von Wright calls the’ success’ sense (cf. Norm and Action, p. 50f.); the conditional states that S’s wanting to move his hand is, given the way things are on this occasion, all that is required for his act’s being successful (not for his doing it but for its being successful if he does it). What ascribes an ability to S is not the ‘could’ in the conditional, but the whole conditional.
A Theory of Human Action, p. 73; cf. also p. 114.
‘Freedom to Act’, p. 149.
Cf. above, p.278f.
David Pears, ‘Desires as Causes of Action’ (in G. Vesey, ed., The Human Agent, London, 1968) is a typical example. In order to show that the theory could be true Pears postulates a “degree of feeling” which accompanies every act and which can be identified independently of the act. This may save the causal theory from incoherence but the price is implausibility.
‘Freedom to Act’, p. 155.
Explanation and Understanding, p. 199, n. 39.
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© 1976 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Stoutland, F. (1976). The Causal Theory of Action. In: Manninen, J., Tuomela, R. (eds) Essays on Explanation and Understanding. Synthese Library, vol 72. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1823-4_14
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