Action and Rationalization

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.

KEYWORDS:

• action
• rationalization
• motivating reasons
• Davidson
• causal theory of action

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See, most clearly, Davidson [1980c]. He uses the term differently elsewhere [1980a]. Here is a sample of authors who appeal to rationalization: Antony [1989], Moya [1998], Mintoff [2002], Hornsby [2004], Smith [2004b, 2012], O’Brien [2006], Wedgwood [2006], Schlosser [2007, 2011], Hurley [2018], and Wald and Tenenbaum [2018],

2 I suspect that something like the subset problems motivated Davidson’s original appeal to rationalization (see, especially, [1980c]).

3 Related ideas can be found in Enç [2003].

4 I discuss weaker versions of GUISE in [2016].

5 Compare also Levin [1988] and Quinn [1993].

6 This idea is discussed by Davidson [1980a, 1980e] and Anscombe [1981, 2000: 11–12], although Anscombe employs it somewhat differently.

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].

9 This is defended by Davidson [1980a]. For further discussion, see Pryor [2007], Setiya [2011], and Fogal [2018].

10 For ideas in this spirit, see Antony [1989: 157] and Arpaly and Schroeder [2014: 55–6].

11 For some suggestive ideas, though, see Smith [2009].

12 This idea is in the spirit of Goldman [1970: 54–5] and Shepherd [2014].

13 This will be disputed by philosophers, such as Schroeder [2007], who accept this consequence. Those philosophers should nonetheless reject Belief Theory 3, on Pluralism Constraint grounds.

14 Davidson [1980c: 84] at this time identified pro-attitudes with judgments that specific actions are desirable.

15 This picture of the reasoning can be found in Broome [2013], as well as McHugh and Way [2016b]. It is also closely associated with the ‘Reasoning View’ about normative reasons: see Hieronymi [2011], Silverstein [2016], McHugh and Way [2016a], and Way [2017]. For my version of the Reasoning View, see Asarnow [2016, 2017].

16 I make this idea precise in [2017].

17 Other necessary conditions might include, for example, that the agent is responsive to the norms of reasoning [Broome 2013: 245–7], or that the agent does not believe any ‘defeaters’ for the pattern of reasoning.

18 This is developed by, e.g., Hieronymi [2011], McHugh and Way [2016a], Silverstein [2016], and Way [2017].

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.