Donald Davidson’s ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ is undoubtedly the first cause of the causal theory of action in contemporary philosophy. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that most action theorists take this paper to establish the truth of the causal theory in general and leave open to dispute only issues about the proper way to spell out details of the causal theory. Since I shall argue that the causal theory is in principle mistaken independent of the details of particular versions of it, let me start things by presenting his argument for the causal theory.60
60. Whether Davidson means to offer a reductive causal theory is unclear. On the one hand, his worry about responding to the problem of deviant causal chains by saying that the mental states must efficient cause the bodily movements ‘in the right way’ makes it seem like shares explanatory ambitions with reductive causal theorists, as I explain in a bit. On the other hand, he explicitly invokes the idea of an action when specifying the intentional content of the mental states that constitute a practical thought without mentioning it. On my view, these two postures are incompatible. Either there is no problem with ruling out deviant causal chains by qualifying the description of the efficient causal relation in a way that invokes the idea of an action or there is a problem with invoking the idea of an action within the intentional content of the mental states that efficiently cause the bodily movements.
Davidson does not start his investigation from the first-person perspective that is essential to action. He instead starts from how a spectator might describe my action to a third person, from which he infers the metaphysical constitution of action. According to him, an action explanation “rationalizes” what happens by citing “something the agent saw, or thought he saw, in his acting” (Davidson [1963] 3). For example, when I reach on the bookshelf, you understand me as acting only if an answer to ‘What is JDF doing?’ makes my moving in this way intelligible. Say someone else tells you that I am looking for my copy of Authority and Estrangment in order to commit it to the flames. It entirely lacks abstract reasoning about quantity or number. It contains no experimental reasoning about matter of fact and existence. Hence, it contains nothing but sophistry and illusion. It must go. This account explains what I am doing in terms of why I am doing it. In doing so, it unifies my movements into a coherent process with respect to a goal. I am moving around in order to find the book. I am looking for the book in order to
commit it into the flames. I am committing it to the flames in order to rid my library of volumes of divinity and school metaphysics. So, an action explanation explains what I do in terms of my conception of why I am doing it. It relates my doing to my thinking.
Causal theorists, though, need to explain the way that this thinking and doing consist of mental states and events. Otherwise, all that an action explanation says is that I act because of my sense of why I act. Davidson’s focus is on the thinking. His view is that a practical thought “consists of a pro attitude of the agent towards actions with a certain property, and a belief of the agent that” this action “has that property” (ibid. 5). The ‘pro-attitude’ explains the goodness that I find in the action, whereas the belief explains why I take acting in this way to be a way to achieve, realize, promote, or whatever that standard of goodness. In this way, Davidson accounts for the agent’s practical thought in terms of a set of mental
states that constitute it. To take the previous example, the proper way to explain the action is not to link the phases of my action one to another with an ‘in order to’ teleological explanation. The proper way to explain it is instead to connect what happens with a belief and a desire of mine whose intentional contents stand in an appropriate rational relationship to each other and a description of what happens as an action. I am moving about the room because I desire to commit Moran, or his work at least, to the flames and I believe that I can do so only if I find my copy somewhere in my library.
An account of human action needs to include more than an account of the mental states that constitute my practical thought. Action involves more than thinking, except, of course, where the action is mental in nature. I might have a set of relevant mental states without ‘acting from’ them. For instance, presuming that a belief-desire pair constitute a practical thought, I might desire your attention and believe that I can get it by moving my arm. Yet I might do nothing. Even if you attend to me because my arm moves, I do not act if, say, a taser makes it move (unless I apply the taser to myself or get someone to do it, I suppose). In fact, even if I get your attention by moving my arm, I might get your attention only accidentally while I act from some other practical thought. I might be hailing the guy selling roses in order to take one home to my sweetie like all those swell guys do in the talkies. But then what is the relationship between the mental states and my bodily movements when an action explanation in terms of those mental states is accurate?
Davidson’s response is that “the relation between [those mental states] and an action ... is ... that the agent performed the action because he had” those mental states, where the causality of ‘because’ is efficient causation (ibid. 9).61 Hence, the set of mental states, not the agent, efficiently causes the bodily
61. Although nothing in this paper turns on this issue, I follow most causal theorists in treating the bodily movement as the intentional action rather than the efficient causal complex of mental states and bodily movements. I in fact think that the best
movement. I have a practical thought when I have tokens of the specified types of mental states that have appropriately related intentional contents. I act from that practical thought when that set of mental states efficiently causes my movements. I act intentionally, then, just when and because a specified set of mental states efficiently causes relevant bodily movements. That is the link between thought and action that differentiates my intentional actions from everything else that happens my life.62
Although few causal theorists accept the details of this explanation, they agree with Davidson about its form. For them, an account of human action has an additive structure of the form ‘x + y =
human action’. ‘X’ is the placeholder for the relevant set of mental states, ‘y’ for the relevant bodily movements, and ‘+’ for the relevant efficient causal relation between the mental states and bodily movements. Their main intramural disagreement is about which mental states are part of the relevant set that distinguishes a human action from everything else. This debate tends to consist of counterexamples wherein an event that is not a human action meets the details of a specific additive theory. Still, while the details differ, the general form of the explanation is the same. It is this form that I shall criticize.