David-Hillel Ruben

This chapter introduces the idea of a particular sort of philosophical naturalism — folk naturalism — and explains what this doctrine says about action. It describes its commitment to a reconstructive analysis of action in folk terms, but ones thought to be acceptable to the naturalist. It proposes three theories of action, pointing out a crucial assumption that all three share, and then focuses on the theory favoured by folk naturalism, the causal theory of action. The chapter explains some of its main ideas and, in particular, focuses on the requirement of rationalization that is part of the causal theory's requirements for action.

This chapter introduces some further distinctions and terminology for the ensuing discussion of action. It notes the distinction between action and activity. It presents the idea of events intrinsic to actions and considers which, if any, causal antecedents or consequences of one's own actions are themselves intrinsic to one's own actions. It distinguishes three kinds of chains that are action-involving: action-causal chains, action chains, and teleological chains. It discusses the concept of base action. Finally, the chapter argues that there are both physical and mental actions, and argues against the proposal that every action is a mental action.

This chapter addresses the question of the identity conditions for actions: what must be true for action _a_ 1 = action _a_ 2. It contrasts austere and prolific theories of action individuation. Austere theories tend to find multiplicity in descriptions but uniqueness in the action to which multiple descriptions may refer. Prolific theories find multiplicity in the actions themselves. Through the introduction of the ‘puzzle of posthumous predication’, the chapter makes use of Peter Geach's idea of Cambridge changes, in contrast to real ones. Using the parallel idea of a Cambridge action, it states and defends a variant of prolific theory, dubbed ‘the Cambridge theory of action individuation’.

This book pursues some novel and unusual standpoints in the philosophy of action. It rejects, for example, the most widely held view about how to count actions, and argues for what it calls a ‘prolific theory’ of act individuation. It also describes and argues against the two leading theories of the nature of action, the causal theory and the agent causal theory. The causal theory cannot account for skilled activity, nor for mental action. The agent causalist theory unnecessarily reifies causings. The book identifies an assumption that they share, and that most action theorists have assumed to be unproblematic and uncontroversial, that an action is, or entails the existence of, an event. Several different meanings to that claim are disentangled and in the most interesting sense of that claim, the book denies that it is true. The book's own alternative is simple and unpretentious: nothing informative can be said about the nature of action that explicates action in any other terms. The book sketches a theory of causal explanation of action that eschews the requirement for laws or generalizations, and this effectively quashes one argument for the oft-repeated view that no explanations of action can be causal, on the grounds that there are no convincing cases of laws of human action. It addresses a number of questions about the knowledge an agent has of his own actions, looking particularly at examples of pathological cases of action in which, for one reason or another, the agent does not know what he is doing.

This chapter will attempt to show that there are no particulars that are causings, no acts or events of causing. As in the chapters on trying, it is important to show (a) some of the negative consequences of introducing causing-particulars; (b) that there is no need to reify causings in that way; and (c) that there is an alternative to their introduction.There is however one adverbial modification that needs special examination: ‘with instrument i’. Does (1) ‘P openedt the door with a crowbar’ imply (2) ‘P caused the door to openi with a crowbar’? If so, it seems that (2) attributes ‘with a crowbar’ either to an openingi or to a causing. What other options might there be? The second option would give us causing particulars.According to a rule of Terence Parsons’, the first option is ruled out. Instrumentals must be attributed to actions, not events, and so, extrapolating this to the case of causing something, one seems to need an act of causing to which the instrumental could be attributed. I look at an ‘ingenious’ solution due to Maria Alvarez that accepts that rule, but would still not require any quantification over causings. I then consider a reply to her by Erasmus Mayr that shows that her solution will not work. I end by showing how one-particularism solves the problem, but at the cost of denying Parsons’ rule.

I introduce the idea that an act of trying is identical to some physical action. Identity requires (at least) one-one correspondence: for each token trying act, there would have be one and only one token physical act (of course, namely itself) with which it is identical. There are two obstacles to the physical action theory of trying that are the opposite of one another: first, the availability of too many particular physical action tokens, and second, the lack of any. My discussion of the too-many-tokens problem leads me into a consideration of what I call the ‘mereological strategy’. I argue that that strategy fails but I leave it open whether or not some non-mereological parallel strategy might succeed. Finally, I look at the lack-of-any-physical-tokens problem, sometimes called ‘naked trying’. I sharpen the argument from the premiss that there are naked tryings to the conclusion that the physical identity theory fails. I believe that it is a scientifically established fact that there are such cases (it’s not just a matter about one’s ‘philosophical intuitions’ about such cases) and I examine two attempts to circumvent the naked trying argument and I conclude that they are unsuccessful.

I intend to use this introduction as a vehicle for situating the topics discussed in this book within a wider philosophical context, and to describe the main ideas in each chapter. This introduction contains no arguments defending or justifying that context or the presuppositions of my discussion (there will be arguments aplenty about other matters in the following chapters). In theology, a distinction is sometimes drawn between apologetic and confessional theological literature. Apologetic literature seeks to defend a point of view to an audience that is outside the circle of believers; it attempts to convince them of something. Confessional theological literature accepts a point of view as given, but then explains and develops it for those inside the tradition, those who have already ‘bought in’ to the basic assumptions. This Introduction might be thought of as a piece of confessional philosophy, making explicit some of the doxological presuppositions of the book to the already-believers.

I start by explaining what an intrinsic event is. The expression, ‘intrinsic event’, is not innocent; I explain it as best I can here, but the remainder of the book returns repeatedly to this idea and further clarifies it.Philosophers and linguists interested in the question of the relation between doing and causing often refer to, and often conflate, two claims. One of the claims, which is often referred to as Causative Alternation (CA) in the linguistics literature, is an indisputable truth of semantics and the other, (PT) (for ‘Paraphrase Thesis’), is a controversial philosophical analysis. A theme of the chapter is the need to separate out views on the semantics of action verbs from views about the metaphysics of action.The Paraphrase Thesis (PT) says, roughly, that an agent acts iff he [but note: he, not his action] causes some event, for instance, e, and e is then said (in many cases) to be intrinsic to that action. (PT) is false. Since it entails a biconditional, it has two parts: a left-to-right entailment and a right-to-left entailment. In this chapter I examine only the right-to-left entailment.I distinguish the expressions ‘P caused such-and-such’, ‘P was a cause of such-and-such’, and ‘P was the cause of such-and-such’. I also introduce a distinction about causation in order to support my dismissal of the right-to-left entailment: remoteness of cause and partiality of cause.

The purpose of this final chapter about trying is two-fold: (A) to offer an independent argument against any particularist theory of trying other than the one that identifies the trying with a physical action, for example, one that might identify it with a particular mental act or mental event; and (B) to offer an account of trying-sentences (the Conditional Theory of Trying, hereafter the CTT) that does not require trying particulars of any kind. Even if (A) were unsuccessful as an argument, (B) would still stand as a contribution to views available for understanding what trying is. It would help to define the logical space of views one can hold about trying.In (B), I state that account, (CTT), in an initial form, and offer various clarifications of what it says and does not say. The remainder of (B) considers various objections to (CTT), some of which lead me to alter and improve the original formulation: fluky success; time-indexing, metaphysically impossible action, finks and reverse-cycle finks, the nature of blockers and preventers, intentions, and explanations that use trying.There is a lot of overlap between the argument in (A) and in (B), and the two sections make many of the same assumptions, but the arguments have different purposes. The first is a general argument against any particularist account of trying that attributes a ‘bridging’ function to such a particular. The second gives an account of what it is for an agent to try that does not make any particularist assumption.

I describe and categorise the verb ‘to try’, making a number of important distinctions and introducing ideas that will be important in the book, for example, the imperfective paradox. I turn to a Davidsonian-like argument that would seek to show that there must be particular acts of trying, in order to account for the adverbial qualifications in trying-sentences. Most of the chapter then moves through various categories of adverbs, arguing that none of them requires acts of trying to account for the adverbs in these sentences. Along the way, I discuss the opacity of ‘to try’. There is an important distinction between adverbs that occur inside the context governed by ‘to try’ and those that occur outside that context, and I show how that distinction is important for assessing the strength of those Davidsonian-like arguments.Since naked trying might be thought to pose a particularly difficult challenge for my claim, I then apply the same arguments to cases of naked trying, to show that sentences about naked trying that have an adverbial qualification do not require the adjectival modification of an act of trying.I discuss some further considerations from Jonathan Bennett and Artemis Alexiadou that would support my view that there are no trying particulars. Finally, I look at, and dismiss, some examples that might force the conclusion that there are trying particulars in spite of the failure of the arguments from adverbial attribution: reference back, causation, attempts in law, and attitudes.

This chapter has two sections, both of which develop some of the consequences of one-particularism. The first section is about the possibility that some regress, vicious or otherwise, arises on the conjunction of one-particularism and the left-to-right inference of (PT), since I accept both of those conjuncts.The second question is a sceptical question. Could there be a possible world in which no other agents, minded like ourselves, ever act, either intentionally or unintentionally, although, for all the events that would have been intrinsic or extrinsic to their actions had they acted, there are intrinsically qualitatively identical mere events that occur anyway? If there were such a possible world, how would a person know whether the world that he is in is that world or some other world in which the other agents really do act?Do I solve the sceptical question about knowledge of the actions of others that I introduce? No. I tentatively outline (but do not commit myself to) a ‘disjunctivist’ suggestion for addressing the sceptical question. The discussion on scepticism also allows me to apply (CTT) from Chap. 10.1007/978-3-319-90347-7_4 and to demonstrate how it works in thinking about this question about others’ actions. It also allows me to make some points of (I believe) some interest about the epistemology of action.

Does the LHS of (PT) entail its RHS? When a person acts (and the action verb is an ergative verb), isn’t it trivially true that he causes, i.e., that he is a cause of, the event intrinsic to the action, trivially true that he brings that very event about? Are all doings causings even if not all causings are doings? It is this question that this chapter addresses.I do hold that the LHS of (PT) entails the RHS. But should we understand the LHS and the RHS of (CA) as being about two particulars or as using two descriptions of a single particular? I describe one-particularism as the view that takes the second of those options. I strengthen the case for one-particularism by looking at the idea of Cambridge changes (and hence Cambridge actions). I examine two obvious counter-arguments to one-particularism: (a) that, on an action chain, an action doesn’t cause another action, but it only causes the event that is intrinsic to its successor action on the chain, if it has one; (b) Alvin Goldman’s view, shared by many others, that would imply that one-particularism gets the time of an action wrong.

There appear to be multifunctional artefacts of a type such that none of their functions can be attributed only to some proper part of the artefact. I use two examples of allegedly multifunctional artefacts of this kind in what follows, one due to Lynne Rudder Baker (aspirin) and another of my own (a spork). The two examples are meant to make the same point. I discuss her aspirin example, since its discussion has entered the literature, but without its being dealt with satisfactorily. My example is, I believe, more intuitive than that of aspirin, which Baker introduced in her response to a challenge to her views, and so I will mostly rely on my example of a spork, especially at the end of the paper, to make my case. I argue that in at least those two cases, if the standard arguments for distinguishing between an object and what constitutes it are sound, an argument showing that what we might have taken to be a single multifunctional object is in fact a case of multiple single-function artefacts which collocate. Or almost. There is one further assumption needed for these cases, beyond what the constitution cases require, and I produce reasons for accepting that assumption.