Luca Bellini

There is a wide range of expressive actions we do. We kick cars that refuse to start, we kiss and talk to pictures, we wreck damage to the belongings of someone who cheated on us, and many others along the same lines. The problem of expressive action is the problem of explaining why we do such bizarre things. According to the received view, these are just actions out of emotion. In this paper instead, I argue that they are much more like make-believe games. Having to firstly clarify what makes expressive actions expressive as well as what – if anything – they express, I draw on a hitherto overlooked analogy with both children’s games (e.g. duelling with make-believe swords) and rituals (e.g. burning in effigy) to claim that expressive actions, too, prescribe what is fictionally the case. In tearing someone’s picture apart, for instance, we are staging an imaginary punishment, thereby making it fictional that it is possible so to punish. While furthering our understanding of the role that imagination plays in justifying some kinds of agency, the problem of expressive action turns out to have important implications for the nature of practical reasons and the central problem of explaining what makes something an action in the first place.