ABSTRACT
According to the ‘standard story’ in the philosophy of action, actions are those movements of a creature’s body that are caused and rationalized by the creature’s mental states. The attractions of the causal condition have been widely discussed. The rationalization condition is nearly ubiquitous, but it is notoriously obscure, and its motivation has rarely been made explicit. This paper presents a new argument for including the rationalization condition in the causal theory of action, and sketches a broadly Davidsonian theory of what rationalization is.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 See, most clearly, Davidson [Citation1980c]. He uses the term differently elsewhere [Citation1980a]. Here is a sample of authors who appeal to rationalization: Antony [Citation1989], Moya [Citation1998], Mintoff [Citation2002], Hornsby [Citation2004], Smith [Citation2004b, Citation2012], O’Brien [Citation2006], Wedgwood [Citation2006], Schlosser [Citation2007, Citation2011], Hurley [Citation2018], and Wald and Tenenbaum [Citation2018],
2 I suspect that something like the subset problems motivated Davidson’s original appeal to rationalization (see, especially, [Citation1980c]).
7 For simplicity, this section will assume that motivating reasons are mental states, rather than a function of mental states. Nothing in my argument will depend on that assumption.
8 I discuss a similar case elsewhere [2016].
11 For some suggestive ideas, though, see Smith [Citation2009].
13 This will be disputed by philosophers, such as Schroeder [Citation2007], who accept this consequence. Those philosophers should nonetheless reject Belief Theory 3, on Pluralism Constraint grounds.
14 Davidson [Citation1980c: 84] at this time identified pro-attitudes with judgments that specific actions are desirable.
17 Other necessary conditions might include, for example, that the agent is responsive to the norms of reasoning [Broome Citation2013: 245–7], or that the agent does not believe any ‘defeaters’ for the pattern of reasoning.
19 I defend this view elsewhere [2016, 2017].
20 For helpful feedback and conversation, I thank Facundo Alonso, Franz Altner, Michael Bratman, Sarah Hannan, Carlos Núñez, Grant Rozeboom, RJ Leland, Samuel Murray, Grace Paterson, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, David Taylor, several anonymous referees, and the editor-in-chief of this journal. Thanks as well to audiences at the University of Manitoba and the University of Vienna, where this material was presented.
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