Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Action

« act.

Where someone Φs by Ψ-ing, Ψ-ing is said to be more basic than Φ-ing; and the basic act is defined as the one than which no other was more basic.

Moving the body (that is, moving a bit of it in one or another way) isusually a basic act.

When Mary raises her right arm directly - in order to vote at the meeting - raising the right armis the basic act.

But in the unusual case in which someone raises their right arm by lifting it with their left arm,raising the right arm, although a bodily act, is not the basic one.

(What is basic here is moving the left arm.) Suchan example shows that in order to say what was basic in a particular case, one has to know not only what bodilymovements occurred in that case but also what was actually done by doing what else.

Acts, then, are not basictout court .

Relative to Mary's action, but not relative to the action that was someone's raising their right arm 'indirectly', raising the right arm is basic.

The need to think about applications of basicness in connection withparticular cases has sometimes given rise to talk of basic actions .

But such talk conflicts with the coarse-grained account of actions' individuation.

Where a person's raising their arm is considered to be identical to their voting, itcannot be supposed that their raising their arm is basic and their voting is not.

If a notion of a basic act that is notrelativized to particular cases is wanted, we have to think about what someone can do directly.

(The person who used their left arm to raise their right arm might, or might not, have been able to simply raise their right arm.) Using a notion of a basic ability , we could speak of things as basic for a person with a particular repertoire of motions (not relative to any particular action now).

We encounter relations of dependence when we go through a list of moreand more basic acts.

Considering Paul's action, and going through his various acts - causing an accident, shuttingoff the engine, depressing the lever, moving the arm - it is natural to think of what is less basic as depending onwhat is more basic.

We may think of all the dependencies as causal ones in the particular example.

But there aredifferent kinds of dependence, and when the different kinds are distinguished, different relations of 'more basic than'can be distinguished.

For example if we take it that a convention must obtain for someone's raising their arm tocount as their voting, we could say about Mary's action that voting was conventionally more basic than raising the arm.

The thought that moving the body is basic seems now to be the thought that moving the body does notusually depend upon anything else - neither causally, nor in any other way.

And yet physiologists tell us that, infact, our bodily movements depend upon our muscles' contractions - that we move our bodies by contracting ourmuscles.

It seems, then, that even where someone simply moved their arm we have a candidate for a more basicact than moving the arm - namely, contracting muscles.

In fact, what this shows is that the perspective of anagent is ordinarily assumed in thinking about what is done; when moving the body is taken as basic, the focus is onthings that the people might think of themselves as doing.

A different notion of basicness is needed to accommodate the facts that the shift to a physiologists' perspective reminds us of.

To allow for the fact thatmoving the body depends upon other things being done, a 'purely causal' notion of basicness may be introduced.This is not the intuitive, central notion that recapitulates the idea of what someone 'simply does' or 'does directly'.Philosophers have meant a variety of different things by 'more basic than'.

3 Volitional theories: actions, parts and causes Events like muscles' contractions, which occur beneath the body's surface, come to notice not only in our thinking about different ideas of basicness: they may be prominent also when we enquire what precise causalstory should be told about any action.

And it is not only physiological thinking which makes philosophers want aprecise causal story: a definition of 'an action' as 'someone's doing something intentionally' belongs with a viewwhich distinguishes actions from other events by reference to a particular sort of psychologically specifiable causalhistory.

On this view, a person who does something intentionally does the thing because they have a reason to.Saying what their reason was requires knowing what their relevant beliefs and desires were; and it provides adistinctive kind of explanation of why they did the thing.

But it may be asked whether there is not a more immediatecausal story to be told about an action than that which shows up in a reason explanation.

Do actions haveimmediate mental antecedents of a certain sort? It has sometimes seemed that actions must have suchantecedents, because wanting, believing and intending all seem inadequate to explain actually doing something.Suppose you want to move your arm.

Your arm doesn't move until … what? 'Until there is a volition' was an answeroften given in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: philosophers often posited volitions, or acts of will (as theyare alternatively called), as events which initiate the causal process of acting, bridging the gap between wantingand doing.

This was a gap between the mind and the body in the thinking of dualists.

Volitions fell out ofphilosophical favour when Ryle objected to them as spurious (Ryle 1949 ).

Ryle asked why 'the Will' has to be exercised in action at all, thinking that the postulation of volitions was a hangover from the idea of a 'ghost in themachine'.

One of his arguments against volitions posed a dilemma: either volitions are themselves 'active', or theyare not.

If they are 'active', then if a volition really were required for a genuine action, we should always have toposit a new volition as cause of any volition, and we should be led to an infinite regress.

If, on the other hand,volitions are not themselves 'active', but are mere causes of actions, it is hard to see why anyone should think thattheir introduction helps in recording what is special to action.

Some volitional theories rather obviously escape thisobjection.

John Stuart Mill, for instance, thought that an action was 'a series of two things; the state of mind calleda volition followed by an effect' (Mill 1843: I 3.5 ).

In its twentieth-century guise, the Millean theory takes an action to be composed from (a) a volition (b) a movement of a bit of the body of the person whose volition it is.

On thistheory, Ryle's question as to whether a volition itself, or only its effect, is 'active' has no simple answer, since eachof these things is a part of an action.

But Ryle's underlying question may still be pressed: 'Why posit a sort of mental item such that actions are present only when an item of that sort is a cause?' The account of volitions asparts of actions draws attention to the distinction between actions , each one of which is someone's moving a bit of their body, and bodies' movements , each one of which is a bit of someone's body's moving.

(The thesis which is often used to summarize the coarse-grained view of actions' individuation - that actions are bodily movements - isnow seen to be crucially ambiguous at best.) When this distinction is made, there are two other views about bodies'movements, both different from the Millean, componential view.

(A) Actions are identical with bodies' movements,so that, for instance, a person's raising their arm is their arm's rising.

(B) Bodies' movements are not even parts ofactions, so that a person's arm's rising is wholly distinct from their raising it.

(A) is implausible inasmuch as it seemsto sever the connection between acting and doing something; unless a person's arm's rising is itself the person's. »