Action (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Cite this entry Search the SEP • Advanced Search • Tools • RSS FeedTable of Contents• What's New• Archives• Projected ContentsEditorial Information• About the SEP• Editorial Board• How to Cite the SEP• Special CharactersSupport the SEPContact the SEP ©Metaphysics Research Lab,CSLI,Stanford University  Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Please Read How You Can Help Keep the Encyclopedia FreeActionFirst published Mon Mar 18, 2002; substantive revision Thu Nov 1, 2007If a person's head moves, she may or may not have moved her head,and, if she did move it, she may have actively performed the movementof her head or merely, by doing something else, caused a passivemovement. And, if she performed the movement, she might have done sointentionally or not. This short array of contrasts (and others likethem) has motivated questions about the nature, variety, and identityof action. Beyond the matter of her moving, when the person moves herhead, she may be indicating agreement or shaking an insect off her ear.Should we think of the consequences, conventional or causal, ofphysical behavior as constituents of an action distinct from but‘generated by’ the movement? Or should we think that thereis a single action describable in a host of ways? Also, actions, ineven the most minimal sense, seem to be essentially‘active’. But, how can we explain what this propertyamounts to and defend our wavering intuitions about which events fallin the category of the ‘active’ and which do not?Donald Davidson [1980, essay 3] asserted that an action, in somebasic sense, is something an agent does that was ‘intentionalunder some description,’ and many other philosophers have agreedwith him that there is a conceptual tie between genuine action, on theone hand, and intention, on the other. However, it is tricky toexplicate the purported tie between the two concepts. First, theconcept of ‘intention’ has various conceptual inflectionswhose connections to one another are not at all easy to delineate, andthere have been many attempts to map the relations between intentionsfor the future, acting intentionally, and acting with a certainintention. Second, the notion that human behavior is often intentionalunder one description but not under another is itself hard to pin down.For example, as Davidson pointed out, an agent may intentionally causehimself to trip, and the activity that caused the tripping may havebeen intentional under that description while, presumably, the foreseenbut involuntary tripping behavior that it caused is not supposed to beintentional under any heading. Nevertheless, both the tripping and itsactive cause are required to make it true that the agent intentionallycaused himself to trip. Both occurrences fall equally, in that sense,‘under’ the operative description. So further clarificationis called for.There has been a notable or notorious debate about whether theagent's reasons in acting are causes of the action — a longstandingdebate about the character of our common sense explanations of actions.Some philosophers have maintained that we explain why an agent acted ashe did when we explicate how the agent's normative reasons rendered theaction intelligible in his eyes. Others have stressed that the conceptof ‘an intention with which a person acted’ has ateleological dimension that does not, in their view, reduce to theconcept of ‘causal guidance by the agent's reasons.’ Butthe view that reason explanations are somehow causal explanationsremains the dominant position. Finally, recent discussions have raisedimportant new questions about the force of normative reasons for actionin the context of the agent's practical deliberation and relatedquestions about the rational role these reasons have in moving him toact.1. The Nature of Action and Agency2. Intentional Action and Intention3. The Explanation of Action4. ReasonsBibliographyOther Internet ResourcesRelated Entries1. The Nature of Action and AgencyIt has been common to motivate a central question about the nature ofaction by invoking an intuitive distinction between the things thatmerely happen to people — the events they undergo— and the various things they genuinely do. The latterevents, the doings, are the acts or actions of theagent, and the problem about the nature of action is supposed to be:what distinguishes an action from a mere happening or occurrence? Forsome time now, however, there has been a better appreciation of thevagaries of the verb ‘to do’ and a livelier sense that thequestion is not well framed. For instance, a person may cough, sneeze,blink, blush, and thrash about in a seizure, and these are all thingsthe person has, in some minimal sense, ‘done,’ although inthe usual cases, the agent will have been altogether passivethroughout these ‘doings.’ It is natural to protest thatthis is not the sense of “do” the canny philosopher ofaction originally had in mind, but it is also not so easy to say justwhat sense that is. Moreover, as Harry Frankfurt [1978] has pointedout, the purposeful behavior of animals constitutes a low-level typeof ‘active’ doing. When a spider walks across the table,the spider directly controls the movements of his legs, andthey are directed at taking him from one location to another. Thosevery movements have an aim or purpose for the spider, and hence theyare subject to a kind of teleological explanation. Similarly, theidle, unnoticed movements of my fingers may have the goal of releasingthe candy wrapper from my grasp. All this behavioral activityis ‘action’ in some fairly weak sense.Nevertheless, a great deal of human action has a richerpsychological structure than this. An agent performs activity that isdirected at a goal, and commonly it is a goal the agent has adopted onthe basis of an overall practical assessment of his options andopportunities. Moreover, it is immediately available to the agent'sawareness both that he is performing the activity in question and thatthe activity is aimed by him at such-and-such a chosen end. At a stillmore sophisticated conceptual level, Frankfurt [1988, 1999] has alsoargued that basic issues concerning freedom of action presuppose andgive weight to a concept of ‘acting on a desire with which theagent identifies.’ Under Frankfurt's influence on thispoint, a good deal has been written to elucidate the nature of‘full-blooded’ human agency, whether the notion is finallydelineated either in Frankfurt's way or along different but relatedlines [see Velleman 2000, essay 6, Bratman 1999, essay 10]. Thus, thereare different levels of action to be distinguished, and these includeat least the following: unconscious and/or involuntary behavior,purposeful or goal directed activity (of Frankfurt's spider, forinstance), intentional action, and the autonomous acts or actions ofself-consciously active human agents. Each of the key concepts in thesecharacterizations raises some hard puzzles.1.1 Knowledge of one's own actions.It is frequently noted that the agent has some sort of immediateawareness of his physical activity and of the goals that theactivity is aimed at realizing. In this connection, Elizabeth Anscombe[1963] spoke of ‘knowledge without observation.’ The agentknows ‘without observation’ that he is performing certainbodily movements (perhaps under some rough but non-negligibledescription), and he knows ‘without observation’ whatpurpose(s) the behavior is meant to serve [see also Falvey 2000].Anscombe's discussion of her claim is rich and suggestive, but herconception of ‘knowledge through observation’ isproblematic. Surely, one wants to say, propioception and kinestheticsensation play some role in informing the agent of the positions andmovements of his body, and it is uncertain why these informationalroles should fail to count as modes of inner ‘observation’of the agent's own overt physical behavior. What Anscombe explicitlydenies is that agents generally know of the positions or movements oftheir own bodies by means of ‘separably describablesensations’ that serve as criteria for their judgements about thenarrowly physical performance of their bodies. However, when a personsees that there is a goldfinch in front of him, his knowledge is notderived as an inference from the ‘separably describable’visual impressions he has in seeing the goldfinch, but this is aninstance of knowledge through observation nonetheless.In a related vein, David Velleman [1989] described this knowledge as‘spontaneous,’ i.e., as knowledge that the agent hasachieved without deriving it from evidence adequate to warrant it.However, it is not so plain that an agent's knowledge that certain ofhis movements have been guided by him toward an objective Oare not derived from prior evidence, reached by him on the basis of asimple causal inference. That is, he knows, in an immediate, firstperson way, that he is committed to objective O as his goal.In addition, he knows, also immediately, that those movements arecaused — causally guided, as it were — by the state ofhaving O as his goal then. If these points are correct, itmay be that an agent knows his present goals and intentions withoutinner or outer evidence, but it may also be that this samenon-observational, non-inferential knowledge itself serves as evidencefor his further belief that his current behavior is directed at asuch-and-such goals. In the same way, an agent can often identifyright off, apparently without consulting evidence at all, what actionit is that he will perform next. Again, it may be that allthat the individual agent really knows immediately is that he has anintention to do so-and-so next, and the knowledge that he is actuallyon the verge of doing so-and-so is grounded for him in an inferencethat takes his intention for the near future as its primary epistemicground [see Wilson 2000, Moran 2001, 2004].These considerations, if right, would mean that one's knowledge ofwhat one is presently doing and one's knowledge of what one is about todo are not spontaneous, in Velleman's suggested sense. And yet, at thisjuncture, the issues are intertwined with difficult questions about thenature of intentions and their relations to first-person beliefs aboutone's forthcoming actions. Velleman and others reject the picture ofevidential support sketched just above, maintaining that the agent'sbelief that he will shortly F is contemporaneous with andembodied in his intention to F. It cannot be, therefore, thathis knowledge of his intention to F provides the grounds fromwhich his expectation of imminent Fing has been derived. Thetangle of issues here merits additional unweaving in futureresearch.1.2 Governance of one's own actions.It is also important to the concept of ‘goal directedaction’ that agents normally implement a kind of directcontrol or guidance over their own behavior. An agent may guide herparalyzed left arm along a certain path by using her active right armto shove it through the relevant trajectory. The moving of her rightarm, activated as it is by the normal exercise of her system of motorcontrol, is a genuine action, but the movement of her left arm is not.That movement is merely the causal upshot of her guiding action, justas the onset of illumination in the light bulb is the mere effect ofher action when she turned on the light. The agent has direct controlover the movement of the right arm, but not over the movement of theleft. And yet it is hardly clear what ‘direct control ofbehavior’ can amount to here. It does not simply mean thatbehavior A, constituting a successful or attemptedFing, was initiated and causally guided throughout its courseby a present-directed intention to be Fing then. Even theexternally guided movement of the paralyzed left arm would seem tosatisfy a condition of this weak sort. Alfred Mele [1992] has suggestedthat the intuitive ‘directness’ of the guidance of actionA can partially be captured by stipulating that theaction-guiding intention must trigger and sustain Aproximally. In other words, it is stipulated that the agent'spresent-directed intention to be Fing should govern actionA, but not by producing some other prior or concurrent actionA* that causally controls A in turn. But the proposalis dubious. On certain assumptions, most ordinary physical actions areliable to flunk this strengthened requirement. The normal voluntarymovements of an agent's limbs are caused by complicated contractions ofsuitable muscles, and the muscle contractions, since they are aimed atcausing the agent's limbs to move, may themselves count as causallyprior human actions. For instance, on Davidson's account of action theywill since the agent's muscle contracting is intentional under thedescription ‘doing something that causes the arm to move’[see Davidson 1980, essay 2]. Thus, the overt arm movement, in a normalact of voluntary arm moving, will have been causally guided bya prior action, the muscle contracting, and consequently the causalguidance of the arm's movement will fail to be an instance of‘proximal’ causation at all [see Sehon 1998].As one might imagine, this conclusion depends upon how an act ofmoving a part of one's body is to be conceived. Some philosophersmaintain that the movements of an agent's body are never actions. It isonly the agent's direct moving of, say, his leg thatconstitutes a physical action; the leg movement is merely caused byand/or incorporated as a part of the act of moving [see Hornsby 1980].This thesis re-opens the possibility that the causal guidance of themoving of the agent's leg by the pertinent intention isproximal after all. The intention proximally governs the moving, if notthe movement, where the act of moving is now thought to start at theearliest, inner stage of act initiation. Still, this proposal is alsocontroversial. For instance, J.L. Austin [1962] held that thestatement(1) The agent moved his legis ambiguous between (roughly) (1′) The agent caused his leg to moveand the more specific (1″) The agent performed a movement with hisleg.If Austin is right about this, then the nominalization “theagent's moving of his leg” should be correspondingly ambiguous,with a second reading that denotes a certain leg movement, a movementthe agent has performed. Thus, no simple appeal to a putativedistinction between ‘movement’ and ‘moving’will easily patch up the conception of ‘direct control ofaction’ under present scrutiny.In any event, there is another well-known reason for doubting thatthe ‘directness’ of an agent's governance of his ownactions involves the condition of causal proximality — that an actionis not to be controlled by still another action of the same agent. Somephilosophers believe that the agent's moving his leg is triggered andsustained by the agent's trying to move his leg in just thatway, and that the efficacious trying is itself an action [see Hornsby1980, Ginet 1990, and O'Shaughnessy 1973, 1980]. If, in addition, theagent's act of leg moving is distinct from the trying, then, again, themoving of the leg has not been caused proximally by the intention. Thetruth or falsity of this third assumption is linked with a wider issueabout the individuation of action that has also been the subject ofelaborate discussion.Donald Davidson [1980, essay 1], concurring with Anscombe, heldthat(2) If a person Fs by Ging, thenher act of Fing = her act of Ging. In Davidson's famous example, someone alerts a burglar byilluminating a room, which he does by turning on a light, which he doesin turn by flipping the appropriate switch. According to theDavidson/Anscombe thesis above, the alerting of the burglar = theilluminating of the room = the turning on of the light = the flippingof the switch. And this is so despite the fact that the alerting of theburglar was unintentional while the flipping of the switch, the turningon of the light, and the illuminating of the room were intentional.Suppose now that it is also true that the agent moved his legby trying to move his leg in just that matter. Combined withthe Davidson/Anscombe thesis about act identification, this impliesthat the agent's act of moving his leg = his act of trying to move thatleg. So, perhaps the act of trying to move the leg doesn't cause theact of moving after all, since they are just the same.The questions involved in these debates are potentially quiteconfusing. First, it is important to distinguish between phraseslike(a) the agent's turning on the lightand gerundive phrases such as (b) the agent's turning on of the light.Very roughly, the expression (a) operates more like a‘that’ clause, viz.(a′) that the agent turned on the light,while the latter phrase appears to be a definite description,i.e.,(b′) the turning on of the light [performed] by theagent. What is more, even when this distinction has been drawn, thedenotations of the gerundive phrases often remain ambiguous, especiallywhen the verbs whose nominalizations appear in these phrases arecausatives. No one denies that there is an internally complex processthat is initiated by the agent's switch-flipping hand movement and thatis terminated by the light's coming on as a result. This processincludes, but is not identical with, the act that initiates it and theevent that is its culminating upshot. Nevertheless, in a suitableconversational setting, the phrases (b) and (b′) can be properlyused to designate any of the three events: the act that turned on thelight, the onset of illumination in the light, and whole processwhereby the light has come to be turned on. [For further discussion,see Parsons 1990, Pietrofsky 2000, and Higgenbotham 2000].Now, the Davidson-Anscombe thesis plainly is concerned with therelation between the agent's act of turning on the light, hisact of flipping the switch, etc. But which configuration ofevents, either prior to or contained within the extended causal processof turning on the light, really constitutes the agent's action? Somephilosophers have favored the overt arm movement the agent performs,some favor the extended causal process he initiates, and some preferthe relevant event of trying that precedes and ‘generates’the rest. It has proved difficult to argue for one choice over anotherwithout simply begging the question against competing positions. Asnoted before, Hornsby and other authors have pointed to the intuitivetruth of(3) The agent moved his arm by trying to move hisarm,and they appeal to the Davidson-Anscombe thesis to argue that the actof moving the arm = the act of trying to move the arm. Onthis view, the act of trying — which is the act ofmoving — causes a movement of the arm in much the same way thatan act of moving the arm causes the onset of illumination in thelight. Both the onset of illumination and the overt arm movement aresimply causal consequences of the act itself, the act of trying tomove his arm in just this way. Further, in light of the apparentimmediacy and strong first person authority of agents' judgements thatthey have tried to do a certain thing, it appears that acts of tryingare intrinsically mental acts. So, a distinctive type of mental actstands as the causal source of the bodily behavior that validatesvarious physical re-descriptions of the act.And yet none of this seems inevitable. It is arguable that(4) The agent tried to turn on the lightsimply means, as a first approximation at least, that(4′) The agent did something that wasdirected at turning on the light.Moreover, when (4) or (4′) is true, then the something theagent did that was directed at turning on the light will have been someother causally prior action, the act of flipping the switch, forexample. If this is true of trying to perform basic acts (e.g., movingone's own arm) as well as non-basic, instrumental acts, then trying tomove one's arm may be nothing more than doing something directed atmaking one's arm move. In this case, the something which was done maysimply consist in the contracting of the agent's muscles. Or, perhaps,if we focus on the classic case of the person whose arm, unknown toher, is paralyzed, then the trying in that case (and perhaps in all)may be nothing more than the activation of certain neural systems inthe brain. Of course, most agents are not aware that they areinitiating appropriate neural activity, but they are aware ofdoing something that is meant to make their arms move. And, in point offact, it may well be that the something of which they are aware as acausing of the arm movement just is the neural activity in the brain.From this perspective, ‘trying to F’ does not namea natural kind of mental act that ordinarily sets off a train offitting physical responses. Rather, it gives us a way of describingactions in terms of a goal aimed at in the behavior without committingus as to whether the goal was realized or not. It also carries nocommitment,concerning the intrinsic character of the behavior that was aimedat Fing,whether one or several acts were performed in the course of trying,andwhether any further bodily effects of the trying were themselvesadditional physical actions [see Cleveland 1997].By contrast, it is a familiar doctrine that what the agent does, inthe first instance, in order to cause his arm to move is to form adistinctive mental occurrence whose intrinsic psychological nature andcontent is immediately available to introspection. The agentwills his arm to move or produces a volition that hisarm is to move, and it is this mental willing or volition that is aimedat causing his arm to move. Just as an attempt to turn on the light maybe constituted by the agent's flipping of the switch, so also, instandard cases, trying to move his arm is constituted by the agent'swilling his arm to move. For traditional ‘volitionalism,’willings, volitions, basic tryings are, in Brian O'Shaughnessy's aptformulation, ‘primitive elements of animal consciousness.’[1] They are elements of consciousness in whichthe agent has played an active role, and occurrences that normally havethe power of producing the bodily movements they represent.Nevertheless, it is one thing to grant that, in trying to move one'sbody, there is some ‘inner’ activity that is meant toinitiate an envisaged bodily movement. It is quite another matter toargue successfully that the initiating activity has the particularmentalistic attributes that volitionism has characteristically ascribedto acts of willing.It is also a further question whether there is only asingle action, bodily or otherwise, that is performed alongthe causal route that begins with trying to move and terminates with amovement of the chosen type. One possibility, adverted to above, isthat there is a whole causal chain of actions that isimplicated in the performance of even the simplest physical act ofmoving a part of one's body. If, for example, ‘action’ isgoal-directed behavior, then the initiating neural activity, theresulting muscle contractions, and the overt movement of the arm mayall be actions on their own, with each member in the line-upcausing every subsequent member, and with all of these actions causingan eventual switch flipping somewhere further down the causal chain. Onthis approach, there may be nothing which is the act offlipping the switch or of turning on the light, because each causallink is now an act which flipped the switch and (thereby) turned on thelight [see Wilson 1989]. Nevertheless, there still will be a singleovert action that made the switch flip, the light turn on, andthe burglar become alert, i.e., the overt movement of the agent's handand arm. In this sense, the proposal supports a modified version of theDavidson/Anscombe thesis.However, all of this discussion suppresses a basic metaphysicalmystery. In the preceding two paragraphs, it has been proposed that theneural activity, the muscle contractions, and the overt hand movementsmay all be actions, while the switch's flipping on, the light's comingon, and the burglar's becoming alert are simply happenings outside theagent, the mere effects of the agent's overt action. As we have seen,there is plenty of disagreement about where basic agency starts andstops, whether within the agent's body or somewhere on its surface.There is less disagreement that the effects of bodily movement beyondthe body, e.g., the switch's flipping on, the onset of illumination inthe room, and so on, are not, by themselves at least, purposefulactions. Still, what could conceivably rationalize any set ofdiscriminations between action and non-action as one traces along thepertinent complex causal chains from the initial mind or brainactivity, through the bodily behavior, to the occurrences produced inthe agent's wider environment?Perhaps, one wants to say, as suggested above, that the agent has acertain kind of direct (motor) control over the goal-seeking behaviorof his own body. In virtue of that fundamental biological capacity, hisbodily activity, both inner and overt, is governed by him and directedat relevant objectives. Inner physical activity causes and is aimed atcausing the overt arm movements and, in turn, those movements cause andare aimed at causing the switch to flip, the light to go on, and theroom to become illuminated. Emphasizing considerations of this sort,one might urge that they validate the restriction of action to eventsin or at the agent's body. And yet, the stubborn fact remains that theagent also does have a certain ‘control’ over what happensto the switch, the light, and even over the burglar's state of mind. Itis a goal for the agent of the switch's flipping on that it turn on thelight, a goal for the agent of the onset of illumination in the roomthat it render the room space visible, etc. Hence, the basis of anydiscrimination between minimal agency and non-active consequenceswithin the extended causal chains will have to rest on some specialfeature of the person's guidance: the supposed ‘directness’of the motor control, the immediacy or relative certainty of theagent's expectations about actions vs. results, or facts concerning thespecial status the agent's living body. The earlier remarks in thissection hint at the serious difficulty of seeing how any such routesare likely to provide a rationale for grounding the requisitemetaphysical distinction(s).2. Intentional Action and IntentionAnscombe opened her monograph Intention by noting that theconcept of ‘intention’ figures in each of theconstructions: (5) The agent intends to G; (6) The agent G'd intentionally; and (7) The agent F'd with the intention ofGing, For that matter, one could add(7′) In Fing (by Fing), the agentintended to G.Although (7) and (7′) are closely related, they seem not tosay quite the same thing. For example, although it may be true that(8) Veronica mopped the kitchen then with the intention offeeding her flamingo afterwards,it normally won't be true that(8′) In (by) mopping the kitchen, Veronica intendedto feed her flamingo afterwards.Despite the differences between them, I will call instances of (7)and (7′) ascriptions of intention in action.[2] Thesesentential forms represent familiar, succinct ways ofexplaining action. A specification of the intention with whichan agent acted or the intention that the agent had in acting provides acommon type of explanation of why the agent acted as he did. Thisobservation will be examined at some length in Section 3.Statements of form (5) are ascriptions of intention for thefuture, although, as a special case, they include ascriptions ofpresent-directed intentions, i.e., the agent's intention to beGing now. Statements of form 6), ascriptions ofacting intentionally, bear close connections to correspondinginstances of (7). As a first approximation at least, it is plausiblethat (6) is true just in case(6′) The agent G'd with the intention of(thereby) Ging.However, several authors have questioned whether such a simpleequivalence captures the special complexities of what it is toG intentionally.[3] Here is an example adapted from Davidson[1980, essay 4]. Suppose that Betty kills Jughead, and she does so withthe intention of killing him. And yet suppose also that her intentionis realized only by a wholly unexpected accident. The bullet she firesmisses Jughead by a mile, but it dislodges a tree branch above his headand releases a swarm of hornets that attack him and sting him until hedies. In this case, it is at least dubious that, in this manner, Bettyhas killed Jughead intentionally. (It is equally doubtful thatBetty killed him unintentionally either.) Or suppose thatReggie wins the lottery, and having bizarre illusions about his abilityto control which ticket will win, he enters the lottery and wins itwith the intention of winning it [Mele 1997]. The first examplesuggests that there needs to be some condition added to (6′) thatsays the agent succeeded in Ging in a manner sufficiently inaccordance with whatever plan she had for Ging as she acted.The second suggests that the agent's success in Ging mustresult from her competent exercise of the relevant skills, and it mustnot depend too much on sheer luck, whether the luck has been foreseenor not. Various other examples have prompted additional emendations andqualifications [see Harman 1976].There are still more fundamental issues about intentions in actionand how they are related to intentions directed at the present and theimmediate future. In “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,”Davidson seemed to suppose that ascriptions of intention in actionreduce to something like the following.(7*) The agent F'ed, and at that time he had apro-attitude toward Ging and believed that by Fing hewould or might promote Ging, and the pro-attitude inconjunction with the means-end belief caused his Fing, andtogether they caused it ‘in the right way.’(In Davidson's widely used phrase, the pro-attitude and associatedmeans-end belief constitute a primary reason for the agent toF.) In this account of ‘acting with an intention’there is, by design, no mention of a distinctive state of intending.Davidson, at the time of this early paper, seemed to favor a reductivetreatment of intentions, including intentions for the future, in termsof pro-attitudes, associated beliefs, and other potential mental causesof action. In any case, Davidson's approach to intention in action wasdistinctly at odds with the view Anscombe had adopted inIntention. She stressed the fact that constructions like (7)and (7′) supply commonsense explanations of why the agentF'd, and she insisted that the explanations in question do notcite the agent's reasons as causes of the action. Thus, she implicitlyrejected anything like (7*), the causal analysis of ‘acting witha certain intention’ that Davidson apparently endorsed. On theother hand, it was less than clear from her discussion how it is thatintentions give rise to an alternative mode of action explanation.Davidson's causal analysis is modified in his later article“Intending” [1980, essay 5]. By the time of this essay, hedropped the view that there is no primitive state of intending.Intentions are now accepted as irreducible, and the category ofintentions is distinguished from the broad, diverse category thatincludes the various pro-attitudes. In particular, he identifiesintentions for the future with the agent's all-out judgments(evaluations) of what she is to do. Although there is some lack ofclarity about the specific character of these practical‘all-out’ judgements, they play an important role inDavidson's overall theory of action, particularly in his strikingaccount of weakness of will [1980, essay 2]. Despite his alteredoutlook on intentions, however, Davidson does not give up the chieflines of his causal account of intentions in action — of what itis to act with a certain intention. In the modified version,(7**) The agent's primary reason for Ging must cause her,in the right way, to intend to G, and her intending toG must itself cause, again in the right way, the agent'sparticular act of Fing.[4]The interpolated, albeit vague, conditions that require causation in‘the right way’ are meant to cover well-knowncounterexamples that depend upon deviant causal chains occurringeither in the course of the agent's practical reasoning or in theexecution of his intentions. Here is one familiar type of example. Awaiter intends to startle his boss by knocking over a stack of glassesin their vicinity, but the imminent prospect of alarming his irascibleemployer unsettles the waiter so badly that he involuntarily staggersinto the stack and knocks the glasses over. Despite the causal role ofthe waiter's intention to knock over the glass, he doesn't do thisintentionally. In this example, where the deviant causation occurs aspart of the performance of the physical behavior itself, we have whatis known as ‘primary causal deviance.’ When the deviantcausation occurs on the path between the behavior and its intendedfurther effects — as in the example of Betty and Jughead above— the deviance is said to be ‘secondary.’ There havebeen many attempts by proponents of a causal analysis of intention inaction (‘causalists,’ in the terminology of von Wright1971) to spell out what ‘the right kind(s)’ of causationmight be, but with little agreement about their success [see Bishop1989, Mele 1997]. Some other causalists, including Davidson, maintainthat no armchair analysis of this matter is either possible orrequired. However, most causalists agree with Davidson's later viewthat the concept of ‘present directed intention’ is neededin any plausible causal account of intention in action and actingintentionally. It is, after all, the present directed intention thatis supposed to guide causally the ongoing activity of the agent [seealso Searle 1983].The simplest version of such an account depends on what MichaelBratman has dubbed “the Simple View.” This is the thesisthat proposition (6) above, [The agent G'd intentionally]and, correspondingly, proposition (7) [The agent Fed with theintention of Ging] entail that, at the time of action, theagent intended to G. Surely, from the causalist point ofview, the most natural account of Ging intentionally is thatthe action of Ging is governed by a present directedintention whose content for the agent is, “I am Gingnow.’ So the causalist's natural account presupposes the SimpleView, but Bratman [1984, 1987] has presented a well-known example toshow that the Simple View is false. He describes a type of case inwhich the agent wants either to φ or to Θ, without havingany significant preference between the two alternatives. The agentdoes know, however, that it is flatly impossible, in the givencircumstances, for him to both φ and Θ although, inthese same circumstances, it is open to him to try to φand try to Θ concurrently. (Perhaps, in trying to φ, hedoes something with one hand, and, in trying to Θ, he doessomething with the other.) Believing that such a two-pronged strategyof trying to achieve each goal maximizes his chances of achieving hisactual goal of either φing or Θing, the agent actively aimsat both of the subordinate ends, trying to accomplish one or theother. The example can be spelled out in such a way that it is clearthat the agent is wholly rational, in his actions and attitudes, as heknowingly pursues this bifurcated attack on his disjunctivegoal. Suppose now that the agent actually succeeds in, say, φingand that he succeeds in virtue of his skill and insight, and notthrough some silly accident. So, the agent φ's intentionally. Itfollows from the Simple View that the agent intended to φ. Andyet, the agent was also doing something with the intention ofΘing and had this attempt succeeded instead (without theintervention of too much luck), then the agent would have Θ'dintentionally. By a second application of the Simple View, it followsthat he also intended to Θ. And yet, just as it is irrationalto intend to φ while believing that it is flatly impossible forhim to φ, so also does it seem irrational to have an intention toφ and an intention to Θ, while believing that it isflatly impossible to do the two things together. So the agent hereshould be open to criticisms of irrationality in his endeavor to φor Θ. Nevertheless, we observed at the outset that he isnot. The only way out is to block the conclusion that, in trying toφ and trying to Θ in these circumstances, the agent has thecontextually irrational pair of intentions, and rejecting the SimpleView is the most direct manner of blocking that conclusion.Even if Bratman's argument defeats the Simple View [see McCann 1986,Knobe 2006], it doesn't rule out some type of causal analysis ofacting intentionally; it doesn't even rule out such an analysis thattakes the crucial controlling cause to be an intention in everyinstance. One might suppose, for example, that (i) in a Bratman case,the agent merely intends to try to φ and intends totry to Θ, and that (ii) it is these intentions thatdrive the agent's actions [Mele 1997]. The analysis in (7**) would bemodified accordingly. However, the project of finding a workable andnon-circular emendation of (7**) remains an open question.The conceptual situation is complicated by the fact that Bratmanholds that (7) [The agent F'd with the intention ofGing] is ambiguous betweenThe agent F'd with the aim or goal ofGingandThe agent F'd as part of a plan that incorporatedan intention to G.(8) above is an especially clear example in which the second readingis required. The second reading does entail that the agent intends toF, and it is only the first that, according to Bratman'sargument, does not. Therefore, Bratman thinks that we need todistinguish intention as an aim or goal of actions and intention as adistinctive state of commitment to future action, a state that resultsfrom and subsequently constrains our practical endeavors as planningagents. It can be rational to aim at a pair of ends one knows to bejointly unrealizable, because aiming at both may be the best way torealize one or the other. However, it is not rational to plan onaccomplishing both of two objectives, known to be incompatible, sinceintentions that figure in rational planning should agglomerate, i.e.,should fit together in a coherent larger plan. Bratman's example andthe various critical discussions of it have promoted important topicsconcerning the very idea of the rationality of actions andintentions, measured against the backdrop of the agent's beliefs andsuppositions.It has been mentioned earlier that Davidson came to identifyintentions for the future with all out judgements about what the agentis to be doing now or should do in the relevant future. Velleman[1989], by contrast, identifies an intention with the agent'sspontaneous belief, derived from practical reflection, which says thathe is presently doing a certain act (or that he will do such an act inthe future), and that his act is (or will be) performed precisely as aconsequence of his acceptance of this self-referential belief. PaulGrice [1971] favored a closely related view in which intention consistsin the agent's willing that certain results ensue, combined with thebelief that they will ensue as a consequence of the particular willingin question. Hector-Neri Castañeda [1975], influenced by Sellars[1966] maintained that intentions are a special species of internalself-command, which he calls “practitions.” Bratman [1987]develops a functionalist account of intention: it is the psychologicalstate that plays a certain kind of characteristic causal role in ourpractical reasoning, in our planning for the future, and in thecarrying out of our actions. This causal role, he argues, is distinctfrom the characteristic causal or functional roles of expectations,desires, hopes, and other attitudes about the agent's futureactions.Individuals do not always act alone. They may also share intentionsand act in concert. There has been growing interest in the philosophyof action about how shared intention and action should be understood. Acentral concern is whether the sharing of intentions should be given areductive account in terms of individual agency (see Searle 1990 for animportant early discussion of the issue). Michael Bratman offers aninfluential proposal in a reductive vein that makes use of his planningconception of intentions. A central condition in his account of sharedcooperative activity is that each participant individually intends theactivity and pursues it in accordance with plans and subplans that donot conflict with those of the other participants. But Margaret Gilberthas objected that reductive approaches overlook the mutual obligationsbetween participants essential to shared activity: each participant isobligated to the others to do his or her share of the activity, andunilateral withdrawal constitutes a violation of this obligation.Gilbert argues that a satisfactory account of these mutual obligationsrequires that we give up reductive individualist accounts of sharedactivity and posit a primitive notion of joint commitment (see alsoTuomela, 2003).Roth takes seriously the mutual obligations identified by Gilbert,and offers an account that, while non-reductive, nevertheless invokes aconception of intention and commitment that in some respects isfriendlier to that invoked by Bratman. It is not entirely clearwhether, in positing primitive joint commitments, Gilbert means tocommit herself to the ontological thesis that there exist group agentsover and above the constituent individual agents. Pettit defends justsuch a thesis. He argues that rational group action often involves the“collectivizing of reason,” with participants acting inways that are not rationally recommended from the participant'sindividual point of view. The resulting discontinuity betweenindividual and collective perspectives suggests, on his view, thatgroups can be rational, intentional agents distinct from theirmembers.3. The Explanation of ActionFor many years, the most intensely debated topic in the philosophy ofaction concerned the explanation of intentional actions in terms ofthe agent's reasons for acting. As stated previously, Davidson andother action theorists defended the position that reason explanationsare causal explanations — explanations that cite the agent'sdesires, intentions, and means-end beliefs as causes of the action[see Goldman 1970]. These causalists about the explanation of actionwere reacting against a neo-Wittgensteinian outlook that claimedotherwise. In retrospect, the very terms in which the debate wasconducted were flawed. First, for the most part, the non-causalistposition relied chiefly on negative arguments that purported to showthat, for conceptual reasons, motivating reasons could not be causesof action. Davidson did a great deal to rebut these arguments. It wasdifficult, moreover, to find a reasonably clear account of what sortof non-causal explanation the neo-Wittgensteinians had inmind. Charles Taylor, in his book The Explanation of Action[1964], wound up claiming that reason explanations are grounded in akind of ‘non-causal bringing about,’ but neither Taylornor anyone else ever explained how any bringing about of an eventcould fail to be causal. Second, the circumstances of the debate werenot improved by the loose behavior of the ordinary concept of ‘acause.’ When someone says that John has cause to be offended byJane's truculent behavior, then “cause” in this settingjust means ‘reason,’ and the statement, “John wascaused to seek revenge by his anger,” may means nothing morethan, “John's anger was among the reasons for which he soughtrevenge.” If so, then presumably no one denies that reasons arein some sense causes. In the pertinent literature, it hasbeen common to fall back on the qualified claim that reasons are not‘efficient’ or ‘Humean’ or‘producing’ causes of action. Unfortunately, the importof these qualifications has been less than perspicuous.George Wilson [1989] and Carl Ginet [1990] follow Anscombe inholding that reason explanations are distinctively grounded in anagent's intentions in action. Both authors hold that ascriptions ofintention in action have the force of propositions that say ofa particular act of Fing that it was intended by its agent toG (by means of Fing), and they claim that such dere propositions constitute non-causal reason explanations of whythe agent Fed on the designated occasion. Wilson goes beyondGinet in claiming that statements of intention in action have themeaning of(9) The agent's act of Fing was directed by him at[the objective] of Ging,In this analyzed form, the teleological character of ascriptions ofintention in action is made explicit. Given the goal-directed nature ofaction, one can provide a familiar kind of teleological explanation ofthe relevant behavior by mentioning a goal or purpose of the behaviorfor the agent at the time, and this is the information (9) conveys. Or,alternatively, when a speaker explains that(10) The agent F'd because he wanted toG,the agent's desire to G is cited in the explanation, not asa cause of the Fing, but rather as indicating a desired goalor end at which the act of Fing came to be directed.Most causalists will allow that reason explanations of action areteleological but contend that teleological explanations in terms ofgoals — purposive explanations in other words — arethemselves analyzable as causal explanations in which the agent'sprimary reason(s) for Fing are specified as guiding causes ofthe act of Fing. Therefore, just as there are causalistanalyses of what it is to do something intentionally, so there aresimilar counterpart analyses of teleological explanations of goaldirected and, more narrowly, intentional action. The causalist aboutteleological explanation maintains that the goal of the behavior forthe agent just is a goal the agent had at the time, one that causedthe behavior and, of course, one that caused it in the right way [forcriticism, see Sehon 1998, 2005].It has not been easy to see how these disagreements are to beadjudicated. The claim that purposive explanations do or do notreduce to suitable counterpart causal explanations issurprisingly elusive. It is not clear, in the first place, what it isfor one form of explanation to reduce to another. Moreover, asindicated above, Davidson himself has insisted that it is not possibleto give an explicit, reductive account of what ‘the right kindof causing’ is supposed to be and that none isneeded. Naturally, he may simply be right about this, but others havefelt that causalism about reason explanations is illicitly protectedby endemic fuzziness in the concept of ‘causation of the rightkind.’ Some causalists who otherwise agree with Davidson haveaccepted the demand for a more detailed and explicit account, and someof the proposed accounts get extremely complicated. Without betteragreement about the concept of ‘cause’ itself, theprospects for a resolution of the debate do not appearcheerful. Finally, Abraham Roth [2000] has pointed out that reasonsexplanations might both be irreducibly teleological and alsocite primary reasons as efficient causes at the same time. It isarguable that similar explanations, having both causal andteleological force, figure already in specifically homeostatic(feedback) explanations of certain biological phenomena. When weexplain that the organism Ved because it neededW, we may well be explaining both that the goal of theVing was to satisfy the need for W and thatit was the need for W that triggered the Ving.One of the principal arguments that were used to show that reasonexplanations of action could not be causal was the following. If theagent's explaining reasons R were among the causes of hisaction A, then there must be some universal causal law whichnomologically links the psychological factors in R (togetherwith other relevant conditions) to the A-type action that theyrationalize. However, it was argued, there simply are no suchpsychological laws; there are no strict laws and co-ordinate conditionsthat ensure that a suitable action will be the invariant product of thecombined presence of pertinent pro-attitudes, beliefs, and otherpsychological states. Therefore, reasons can't be causes. In“Actions, Reasons, and, Causes,” Davidson first pointed outthat the thesis that there are no reason-to-action laws is cruciallyambiguous between a stronger and a weaker reading, and he observes thatit is the stronger version that is required for the non-causalistconclusion. The weaker reading says that there are no reason-to-actionlaws in which the antecedent is formulated in terms of the‘belief/desire/intention’ vocabulary of commonsensepsychology and the consequent is stated in terms of goal directed andintentional action. Davidson accepted that the thesis, on this reading,is correct, and he has continued to accept it ever since. The strongerreading says that there are no reason-to-action laws in any guise,including laws in which the psychological states and events arere-described in narrowly physical terms and the actions arere-described as bare movement. Davidson affirms that there arelaws of this second variety, whether we have discovered them or not.[5]Many have felt that this position only lands Davidson ( quacausalist) in deeper trouble. It is not simply that we suppose thatstates of having certain pro-attitudes and of having correspondingmeans-end beliefs are among the causes of our actions. We supposefurther that the agent did what he did because the having of thepro-attitude and belief were states with (respectively) a conative anda cognitive nature, and even more importantly, they are psychologicalstates with certain propositional contents. The specific character ofthe causation of the action depended crucially on the fact that thesepsychological states had ‘the direction of fit’ and thepropositional contents that they did. The agent F'ed at agiven time, we think, because, at that time, he had a desire thatrepresented Fing, and not some other act, as worthwhile orotherwise attractive to him.Fred Dretske [1988] gave a famous example in this connection. When thesoprano's singing of the aria shatters the glass, it will have beenfacts about the acoustic properties of the singing that were relevantto the breaking. The breaking does not depend upon the factthat she was singing lyrics and that those lyrics expressedsuch-and-such a content. We therefore expect that it will be theacoustic properties, and not the ‘content’ properties thatfigure in the pertinent explanatory laws. In the case of action, bycontrast, we believe that the contents of the agent's attitudesare causally relevant to behavior. The contents of theagent's desires and beliefs not only help justify the action that isperformed but, according to causalists at least, they play a causalrole in determining the actions the agent was motivated to attempt. Ithas been difficult to see how Davidson, rejecting laws of mentalcontent as he does, is in any position to accommodate the intuitivecounterfactual dependence of action on the content of the agent'smotivating reasons. His theory seems to offer no explicationwhatsoever of the fundamental role of mental content in reasonexplanations. Nevertheless, it should be admitted that no one reallyhas a very good theory of how mental content plays its role. Anenormous amount of research has been conducted to explicate what it isfor propositional attitudes, realized as states of the nervous system,to express propositional contents at all. Without some betterconsensus on this enormous topic, we are not likely to get far on thequestion of mental causation, and solid progress on the attribution ofcontent may still leave it murky how the contents of attitudes can beamong the causal factors that produce behavior.In a fairly early phase of the debate over the causal status ofreasons for action, Norman Malcolm [1968] and Charles Taylor [1964]defended the thesis that ordinary reason explanations stand inpotential rivalry with the explanations of human and animal behaviorthe neural sciences can be expected to provide. More recently, JaegwonKim [1989] has revived this issue in a more general way, seeing thetwo modes of explanation as joint instances of a Principle ofExplanatory Exclusion. That Principle tells us that, if there existtwo ‘complete’ and ‘independent’ explanationsof the same event or phenomenon, then one or the other of thesealternative explanations must be wrong. Influenced by Davidson, manyphilosophers reject more than just reason-to-action laws. Theybelieve, more generally, that there are no laws that connect thereason-giving attitudes with any material states, events, andprocesses, under purely physical descriptions. As a consequence,commonsense psychology is not strictly reducible to the neuralsciences, and this means that reason explanations of action andcorresponding neural explanations are, in the intended sense,‘independent’ of one another. But, detailed causalexplanations of behavior in terms of neural factors should also be,again in the intended sense, ‘complete.’ Hence,Explanatory Exclusion affirms that either the reason explanations orthe prospective neural explanations must be abandoned asincorrect. Since we are not likely to renege upon our best, mostworked-out scientific accounts, it is the ultimate viability of thereason explanations from commonsense ‘vernacular’psychology that appear to be threatened. The issues here arecomplicated and controversial — particularly issues about theproper understanding of ‘theoretical reduction.’ However,if Explanatory Exclusion applies to reason explanations of action,construed as causal, we have a very general incentive for searchingfor a workable philosophical account of reason explanations thatconstrues them as non-causal. Just as certain function explanations inbiology may not reduce to, but also certainly do not compete with,related causal explanations in molecular biology, so also non-causalreason explanations could be expected to co-exist with neural analysesof the causes of behavior.4. ReasonsIn the foregoing, reference has been made to explanations of actionsin terms of reasons, but recent work on agency has questionedwhether contemporary frameworks for the philosophy of action havereally articulated the way in which an agent's desires and otherpro-attitudes have the distinctive force of reasons in the setting ofthese ordinary explanations [see Frankfurt 1988, 1999, Smith 1994]. Ofcourse, it is widely recognized that reason explanations both tell uswhat motivated the agent's action and elucidate the justification thatthe action had, at least from the agent's own standpoint. However, themotivating role of ‘reasons’ can come to be separated fromtheir role in providing an apparent justification. Compare thefollowing two cases. In the first case, Smith hears some maliciousgossip about the past career of Jones. Smith takes Jones to be aperson with an absolutely impeccable character, and knows the rumorshe has heard to be untrue. But, Smith's character is not so good. Fora long time, she has felt a stifling envy of Jones, and, on thisoccasion, she has an irresistible, spiteful urge to repeat thedefamatory false gossip and, thereby, damage Jones' exemplaryreputation. Smith knows her desire for what it is — a powerfulbut thoroughly unworthy urge to injure Jones. And she knows that itgives her no justifying reason, no justification whatsoever, forrepeating the nasty gossip. In this case, however, Smith gives in toher jealous inclination, and passes the misinformation along. Now,when she tells the false story, Smith's behavior certainly does have agoal or purpose for her, and we can cite that goal or purpose inexplaining why she acted as she did. But, as has been stipulatedalready, there is an important sense in which even Smith herself doesnot regard her desire as constituting any full-blooded ground orreason for what she does.The contrasting case is much the same, but, in this case, Smithstill has her envious impulses, but she is not subject to theircontrol. Further, there is a central, new dimension to the character ofSmith's practical reflections. She thinks that damaging Jones'unspotted reputation may do something to undermine the standing of acertain organization to which Jones belongs, and Smith seriously feelsthat there are grave political objections to this organization. Shetherefore believes that there would be real value in discrediting it.Smith may have her doubts about whether the envisaged end (discreditingthe organization) justifies the choice of means (harming the innocentSmith). In this variant example, it seems that Smith can rightly thinkthat her desire to hurt Jones' reputation constitutes (in someimportant sense) a genuine reason for her to injure Jones's good name.Now, most ordinary explanations in terms of an agent's reasons foracting are more like the second case. The agent regards her potentiallymotivating pro-attitudes as providing intelligible grounds in favor ofa type of action, and it is a key task of her practical reasoning tosort out the relative reason-giving forces of the competingconsiderations that exist.But, what is the sense of “reason” that is in questionhere? It is tempting to think that, in the second case but not thefirst, Smith regards herself as having a normative reason forslandering Jones, i.e., she believes that she has what constitutes atleast some legitimate prima facie justification for theslander. But, first, this natural idea is controversial, and it hasbeen powerfully challenged, notably in Setiya [2003, 2007]. Second,suppose that we decide that in full-blooded reason explanations theagent must have acted in part on her judgment or impression that shehas normative reasons in favor of the relevant action. We still face anissue about how these judgments carry motivational force for the agentin the instances in which they do. Certainly, an agent can be awarethat she has significant normative reasons for Fing and still have noinclination whatsoever to be moved by her awareness of them. Indeed,she may not even have any disposition to take the awareness seriouslyinto account in her practical deliberation. No doubt, one is tempted tobelieve that there is something irrational about an agent who acceptsthat she has such normative reasons for an action but is utterlyindifferent them. However, we still need an account of how, in normalcases, the normative reasons that the agent registers come to serve asmotivational reasons for her as well. If indeed the motivational forceof these reasons has its source in the agent's practical rationality,then we need to understand more specifically how that might be so. Onthe other hand, if this motivational force has some different source,then that further source needs to be identified and explained as well.[See one Dancy 2000, Wallace 2007, Bratman 2007]The theory of action should be able to explain the differences betweenSmith's reasons and the import they have for her in the twocontrasting cases. It should provide an account of why someteleological explanations of action are also explanations in terms ofgenuine normative reasons for acting and other purposive explanationsare not. In this area, two fundamental questions seem to be linkedclosely with one another. What is it for a person or some otherorganism to be an agent of autonomous action? And, how do we explicatethe special force of reasons for autonomous action in practicalreasoning — a ‘force’ quite different from themotivating impact of an overmastering desire? This is a domain inwhich the philosophy of action (and the philosophy of self-governedagency in particular) intersects in a deep way with foundationalquestions about the nature and functions of practical reasoning andevaluation. A good deal of attention has recently been devoted tothese important problems and the associated issues they engender [seeKorsgaard 1996, Bratman 1999, Velleman 2000, and Moran 2001]. 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Jay, 2006, Normativity and the Will, Oxford:Oxford University Press.Watson, Gary, 2004, Agency and Answerability: SelectedEssays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Wilson, George, 1989, The Intentionality of Human Action,Stanford, CA: Stanford University PressWilson, George, 2000, ‘Proximal Practical Foresight’,Philosophical Studies, 99: 3-19Other Internet ResourcesAction Theory page (Andrei Buckareff, University of Rochester)Action Theory (Élisabeth Pacherie, Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS)Related Entries agency, shared | Davidson, Donald | intention | practical reason | reasons for action: justification vs. explanation | self-knowledge Copyright © 2007 byGeorge Wilson<gmwilson@usc.edu> |
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