Philosophy of Action

An Anthology

Jonathan Dancy, Constantine Sandis, Jonathan Dancy, Constantine Sandis

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118879245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Metafisica filosofica

The Philosophy of Action: An Anthology is an authoritative collection of key work by top scholars, arranged thematically and accompanied by expert introductions written by the editors. This unique collection brings together a selection of the most influential essays from the 1960s to the present day.

• An invaluable collection that brings together a selection of the most important classic and contemporary articles in philosophy of action, from the 1960's to the present day
• No other broad-ranging and detailed coverage of this kind currently exists in the field
• Each themed section opens with a synoptic introduction and includes a comprehensive further reading list to guide students
• Includes sections on action and agency, willing and trying, intention and intentional action, acting for a reason, the explanation of action, and free agency and responsibility
• Written and organised in a style that allows it to be used as a primary teaching resource in its own right

1
Philosophical Investigations §§611–628

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein, L. (2009), Philosophical Investigations §§611–628 (omitting 626), 4th edn., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell). © 2009 by Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

611. “Willing – wanting – too is merely an experience,” one would like to say (the ‘will’ too only ‘idea’). It comes when it comes, and I cannot bring it about.
 Not bring it about? – Like what? What can I bring about, then? What am I comparing it with when I say this?

612. I wouldn’t say of the movement of my arm, for example, that it comes when it comes, and so on. And this is the domain in which it makes sense to say that something doesn’t simply happen to us, but that we do it. “I don’t need to wait for my arm to rise – I can raise it.” And here I am making a contrast between the movement of my arm and, say, the fact that the violent thudding of my heart will subside.

613. In the sense in which I can ever bring about anything (such as stomach-ache through overeating), I can also bring about wanting. In this sense, I bring about wanting to swim by jumping into the water. I suppose I was trying to say: I can’t want to want; that is, it makes no sense to speak of wanting to want. “Wanting” is not the name of an action, and so not of a voluntary one either. And my use of a wrong expression came from the fact that one is inclined to think of wanting as an immediate non-causal bringing about. But a misleading analogy lies at the root of this idea; the causal nexus seems to be established by a mechanism connecting two parts of a machine. The connection may be disrupted if the mechanism malfunctions. (One thinks only of the normal ways in which a mechanism goes wrong, not, say, of cog-wheels suddenly going soft, or penetrating each other, and so on.)

614. When I raise my arm ‘voluntarily’, I don’t make use of any means to bring the movement about. My wish is not such a means either.

615. “Willing, if it is not to be a sort of wishing, must be the action itself. It mustn’t stop anywhere short of the action.” If it is the action, then it is so in the ordinary sense of the word; so it is speaking, writing, walking, lifting a thing, imagining something. But it is also striving, trying, making an effort – to speak, to write, to lift a thing, to imagine something, and so on.

616. When I raise my arm, I have not wished it to rise. The voluntary action excludes this wish. It is, however, possible to say: “I hope I shall draw the circle faultlessly.” And that is to express a wish that one’s hand should move in such-and-such a way.

617. If we cross our fingers in a special way, we are sometimes unable to move a particular finger when someone tells us to do so, if he only points to the finger – merely shows it to the eye. However, if he touches it, we can move it. One would like to describe this experience as follows: we are unable to will to move the finger. The case is quite different from that in which we are not able to move the finger because someone is, say, holding it. One is now inclined to describe the former case by saying: one can’t find any point of application for the will until the finger is touched. Only when one feels the finger can the will know where it is to engage. – But this way of putting it is misleading. One would like to say: “How am I to know where I am to catch hold with the will, if the feeling does not indicate the place?” But then how do I know to what point I am to direct the will when the feeling is there?
 It is experience that shows that in this case the finger is, as it were, paralysed until we feel a touch on it; it could not have been known a priori.

618. One imagines the willing subject here as something without any mass (without any inertia), as a motor which has no inertia in itself to overcome. And so it is only mover, not moved. That is: one can say “I will, but my body does not obey me” – but not: “My will does not obey me.” (Augustine)
 But in the sense in which I can’t fail to will, I can’t try to will either.

619. And one might say: “It is only inasmuch as I can never try to will that I can always will.”

620. Doing itself seems not to have any experiential volume. It seems like an extensionless point, the point of a needle. This point seems to be the real agent – and what happens in the realm of appearances merely consequences of this doing. “I do” seems to have a definite sense, independently of any experience.

621. But there is one thing we shouldn’t overlook: when ‘I raise my arm’, my arm rises. And now a problem emerges: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm rises from the fact that I raise my arm?
 ( (Are the kinaesthetic sensations my willing?) )

622. When I raise my arm, I don’t usually try to raise it.

623. “I want to get to that house at all costs.” – But if there is no difficulty about it, can I strive at all costs to get to the house?

624. In the laboratory, when subjected to an electric current, for example, someone with his eyes shut says “I am moving my arm up and down” – though his arm is not moving. “So”, we say, “he has the special feeling of making that movement.” – Move your arm to and fro with your eyes shut. And now try, while you do so, to talk yourself into the idea that your arm is staying still and that you are only having certain strange feelings in your muscles and joints!

625. “How do you know that you’ve raised your arm?” – “I feel it.” So what you recognize is the feeling? And are you certain that you recognize it right? – You’re certain that you’ve raised your arm; isn’t this the criterion, the measure, of recognizing?
 […]

627. Consider the following description of a voluntary action: “I form the decision to pull the bell at 5 o’clock; and when it strikes 5, my arm makes this movement.” – Is that the correct description, and not this one: “… and when it strikes 5, I raise my arm”? — One would like to supplement the first description: “And lo and behold! my arm goes up when it strikes 5.” And this “lo and behold!” is precisely what doesn’t belong here. I do not say “Look, my arm is going up!” when I raise it.

628. So one might say: voluntary movement is marked by the absence of surprise. And now I don’t mean you to ask “But why isn’t one surprised here?”

Part I
Action and Agency

Introduction to Part I

1.

Although accounts of action have been central to most philosophical systems from Plato to Kant, it is only in recent years (following the writings of Wittgenstein and Anscombe, Chapters 1 and 11) that philosophy of action has come to be seen as a subject in its own right. We begin this volume with enquiries into what we might call the most basic question in this area of study: what is action?

One obvious suggestion is that action is bodily motion. But not all bodily motion is action; when you jog my arm, the motion of my arm is not an action of mine – I haven’t moved my arm – and it isn’t an action of yours, either. So what is the difference between those bodily motions that are actions and those that are not? The most popular strategy is to adopt a causal theory, whereby the distinction between actions and other forms of behavior lies in their causal origins; a sneeze, for instance, is typically not going to count as an action, because it has the wrong sort of cause. So which causes are of the right sort? Davidson’s influential answer to this question identifies the causes of action with (the onset of) beliefs and pro-attitudes (such as desires, preferences, and values) that rationalize the action, that is, show how the action that is their effect made sense to the agent, and so can be thought of as the agent’s reasons for doing what he did (see Chapter 19). Most sneezes are not actions, because they are not caused by rationalizing beliefs and desires, but by such things as tickles. Davidson saw this account as an improvement on earlier views which identified the causes in question with inner acts of will. His view is a form of event-causalism (since the action is an event and its causes are events, too), and due to its prominence in the literature is frequently also referred to as ‘the standard view’.

Event-causalism faces two general challenges. The first, recognized by Davidson himself, is that the right sort of cause (viz. a ‘rationalizing’ one) can bring about an action in the wrong sort of way (i.e. not in virtue of its rationalizing power). So we don’t just need things of the right sort to do the causing, we need them to do their causing in the right sort of way. Davidson (Chapter 2) gives the now famous example of a climber who wants to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and who knows that the way to do this is to let go of the rope; but if this belief and desire together so unnerve him that his grip relaxes and the rope slips through his fingers, the loosening of the grip is something that happens to him rather than something that he does; so it is not an action of his even though it is caused by a rationalizing belief-desire combination (Davidson 1973). This has come to be known as the problem of deviant causes (addressed by Smith in Chapter 28).

The second challenge to event-causalism relates to the lack of any causal role played by agents themselves in all this. If actions are events caused by (the onset of) prior mental states and/or neural processes, we arguably lose sight...