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Action and Causality

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Culture and Cultural Entities

Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 170))

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Abstract

“What made him insult her?” we ask. “What caused him to leave the country?” These are familiar locutions that invite — or appear to invite — causal explanations of human actions. The ease with which such questions arise and are answered suggests the ubiquity of causal explanation regarding the familiar range of human agency. They are not, in any obvious way, restricted to certain defective or deficient or metaphorically or legally extended forms of agency; they are normally entertained wherever we suppose human beings to be capable of the fullest freedom, liberty, choice, deliberate commitment in what they do. Still, there is a nagging and prolonged dispute among philosophers as to whether in principle human action — or at any rate, the actions of a so-called free agent, free actions, actions freely performed — may be explained in causal terms or must be explained in one or another contracausal way.

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Notes

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  2. Cf. A. I. Melden, Free Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).

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  5. Alvin I. Goldman, A Theory of Action (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970).

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  7. A Theory of Action, pp. 6 3–64. Nonbasic actions, therefore, are “generated” by basic acts that are caused (by the agent’s wants and beliefs).

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  8. See for instance ‘Mental Events’, in Lawrence Foster and J. W. Swanson (eds.), Experience and Theory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970);

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  72. There is an intriguing and not merely superficial resemblance here to H. P. Grice’s analysis of speaker’s meaning; cf. ‘Meaning’, Philosophical Review, LXVI (1957).

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  1. Temple University, USA

    Joseph Margolis

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© 1984 Joseph Margolis

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Margolis, J. (1984). Action and Causality. In: Culture and Cultural Entities. Synthese Library, vol 170. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7694-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7694-9_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-015-7696-3

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