{"agent_id":"davidson","agent_name":"Donald Davidson","slug":"reasons-and-causes","label":"Reasons and causes: does the reason for which an agent acts explain the action in the same sense that causes explain their effects?","topic":"Reasons and causes","question":"Does the reason for which an agent acts explain the action in the same sense that causes explain their effects?","position":"Reasons for action are causes. A primary reason for an action is a pair consisting of a pro-attitude toward some feature of the action and a belief that the action has that feature. When an agent acts for a reason, that reason caused the action; the reason is not merely a description of the action under which it makes sense. Rationalization — the retrospective attribution of reasons that make an action intelligible — is causal explanation: it is the identification of the mental events that caused the action. Only if the reason caused the action in the right way does it explain rather than merely fit the action.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Reasons for action are causes.","n":[]},{"t":"A primary reason for an action is a pair consisting of a pro-attitude toward some feature of the action and a belief that the action has that feature.","n":[]},{"t":"When an agent acts for a reason, that reason caused the action; the reason is not merely a description of the action under which it makes sense.","n":[]},{"t":"Rationalization — the retrospective attribution of reasons that make an action intelligible — is causal explanation: it is the identification of the mental events that caused the action.","n":[1,2,3]},{"t":"Only if the reason caused the action in the right way does it explain rather than merely fit the action.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"'Actions, Reasons, and Causes' (1963, in Essays on Actions and Events, OUP 2001) — the founding paper; 'Freedom to Act' (1973, in Essays) on freedom and action; 'Intending' (1978, in Essays) on the logical form of intention-statements; essays on weakness of will and acting against one's better judgment in Problems of Rationality (OUP 2004). Reception: G.E.M. Anscombe's Intention (Blackwell 1957) — the standing non-causal alternative; Alvin Goldman's A Theory of Human Action (1970) — agent-causation account; Jennifer Hornsby's Actions (1980) — basic-action analysis; Michael Bratman's Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (1987) — planning theory as development; the wayward causal chain literature (Harry Frankfurt, Colin McGinn); Jaegwon Kim's Supervenience and Mind (1993) — causal exclusion challenge; Fred Dretske's and Robert Audi's non-causal alternatives.","works":["'Actions, Reasons, and Causes' (1963, in Essays on Actions and Events, OUP 2001) — the founding paper","'Freedom to Act' (1973, in Essays) on freedom and action","'Intending' (1978, in Essays) on the logical form of intention-statements","essays on weakness of will and acting against one's better judgment in Problems of Rationality (OUP 2004)"],"reception":"G.E.M. Anscombe's Intention (Blackwell 1957) — the standing non-causal alternative; Alvin Goldman's A Theory of Human Action (1970) — agent-causation account; Jennifer Hornsby's Actions (1980) — basic-action analysis; Michael Bratman's Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (1987) — planning theory as development; the wayward causal chain literature (Harry Frankfurt, Colin McGinn); Jaegwon Kim's Supervenience and Mind (1993) — causal exclusion challenge; Fred Dretske's and Robert Audi's non-causal alternatives.","status":"The anti-causalist consensus of mid-century analytic philosophy — that reason-explanations are not causal because reasons stand in logical rather than contingent relations to actions, because intentional descriptions and causal descriptions are conceptually independent — is mistaken. The logical independence of descriptions does not imply the factual independence of what is described. The same event can be a mental event under an intentional description and a physical event under a physical description; the causal relation holds between events as particulars, not between descriptions. Wayward causal chain cases — the nervous climber, the golfer whose anxious belief causes an unintended movement — identify the form the causal condition must take, not a refutation of the causal thesis.","era":"1917-2003","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Intention and Action","page":"pp. 13–14","canonical":"","quote":"We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action. In this paper I want to defend the ancient—and common-sense—position that rationalization is a species of causal explanation. The defence no doubt requires some redeployment, but it does not seem necessary to abandon the position, as has been urged by many recent writers.","label":"Intention and Action, pp. 13–14"},{"n":2,"work":"Intention and Action","page":"p. 14","canonical":"","quote":"Now it is possible both to reformulate the claim that rationalizations are causal explanations and to give structure to the argument by stating two theses about primary reasons: 1. In order to understand how a reason of any kind rationalizes an action it is necessary and sufficient that we see, at least in essential outline, how to construct a primary reason. 1 Actions, Reasons, and Causes 2.","label":"Intention and Action, p. 14"},{"n":3,"work":"Problems of Rationality","page":"p. 194","canonical":"","quote":"Second, the reasons an agent has for acting must, if they are to explain the action, be the reasons on which he acted; the reasons must have played a *causal* role in the occurrence of the action. These two conditions on reason explanations are both necessary, but they are not sufficient, since some causal relations between belief-desire pairs and actions do not give reason explanations.","label":"Problems of Rationality, p. 194"},{"n":4,"work":"Intention and Action","page":"pp. 17–18","canonical":"","quote":"'I knew I ought to return it', 'The paper said it was going to snow', 'You stepped on my toes', all, in appropriate reason-giving contexts, perform this familiar dual function. The justifying role of a reason, giving this interpretation, depends upon the explanatory role, but the converse does not hold.","label":"Intention and Action, pp. 17–18"},{"n":5,"work":"Problems of Rationality","page":"p. 194","canonical":"","quote":"H. Feigl and M. Scriven (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1956); Alasdair Maclntyre, *The Unconscious* (Routledge, London, 1958); R. S. Peters, *The Concept of Motivation* (Routledge, London, 1958); Charles Taylor, *The Explanation of Behaviour* (Routledge, London, 1965).","label":"Problems of Rationality, p. 194"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"truth-theoretic-semantics","label":"Truth-theoretic semantics: can a Tarski-style recursive truth theory serve as the vehicle for a compositional meaning theory for natural languages?"},{"slug":"the-principle-of-charity","label":"The Principle of Charity: is the requirement to attribute largely true beliefs a constitutive condition on interpretation or a distorting methodological prejudice that forces agreement?"},{"slug":"anomalous-monism","label":"Anomalous monism: are mental events identical to physical events but irreducible as mental, and does this position escape epiphenomenalism?"},{"slug":"conceptual-schemes-and-the-third-dogma-of-empiricism","label":"Conceptual schemes and the third dogma of empiricism: is the concept of a radically different conceptual scheme intelligible, or does it dissolve under examination?"},{"slug":"indeterminacy-of-interpretation-and-inscrutability-of-refere","label":"Indeterminacy of interpretation and inscrutability of reference: does the absence of a unique correct interpretation collapse into nihilism about meaning?"}]}