Abstract

Chapters 1 through 3 concern the individuation and identity conditions of action i.e. the ontology of action. Chapter 1 introduces the issues through consideration of the locution form "x A-ed by Y-ing". I examine Goldman's and Davidson's opposing theories on such, rejecting the former while finding the latter plausible. Chapter 2 offers a positive defense of Davidson's "unifier" thesis. But I urge that its success does not provide us with an ontology of action, as Davidson seems to think. Davidson thinks that he has shown that all actions are basic actions and that all basic actions are bodily motions; rather, I urge that he's shown that all action expressions are coreferential with some expression of the form "his causing of such and such a bodily state" and that these are basic action-descriptions. In chapter 3, I suggest that the denotation of such basic descriptions is a species of mental event, a volitional thought-episode. I criticize other entries in the volition theory genre which hold that to will as such is to act. My view has a volition describable as "action" only if it gives rise to a bodily state satisfying the event's propositional content. The concept of an action is that of a type of cause of a bodily state and such causes are volitions. ;In chapter 4, I engage Davidson's causal theory of action and his seeming despair over "wayward causal chains". I shore up his faultily stated thesis and aver that the possibility of articulating deviant causal chain examples depends upon a mistaken picture of the sequence of events in the practical reasoning process. Chapter 5 addresses Davidson's account of rationalization and argument for anomalous monism. The former I seek to sympathetically clarify and the latter, I say, while correctly incorporating a commitment to the irreducibility of the mental to the physical, is founded on odd theory of event identity. I seek to rectify this and come up with an argument for dualistic interactionism