Reading Group: Davidson: Actions, Reasons, and Causes

The Learning Zone Reading Groups
101

The metal disk and the coin are extensionally equivalent.

Let’s go over the difference between extension and intension. The intension of the are the attributes that are applicable to the individual; that it is nickel alloy, is embossed with a portrait of the king, was stamped at the Canberra Mint, is in my pocket, and so on. The extension is… this; the very item. The one extension may, then, have various differing descriptions of its intensional characteristics. This amounts to a constipated way of saying, for example, that that fellow, Banno, may be described in various different ways.

The idea in Davidson then is that we can best account for actions by individuating them; since in so doing, we allow for quantification; there was an event which was a buttering of toast; that event was done by Jones; That event was done slowly; that event was done deliberately; and so on.

Perhaps he buttered the toast because he had a craving for buttered toast; a pro-attitude; together with a belief that the way to satisfy that pro-attitude was to butter the toast. Together these form a reason for Jones buttering the toast.

The onset of that pro-attitude and belief, the onset of that reason, was a mental event.

That mental event satisfies the explanation for the buttering: “Jones buttered the toast because he was craving buttered toast, together with a belief that buttering the toast would satisfy that craving”.

This gives us the cause of the event.

This, together with various if’s and but’s, is the sort of thing Davidson has in mind in Actions, Reasons and Causes.

He also argued that the mental event involved must be the same as (token identical to; the same individual) some unspecified physical event, in order to count as a cause, in the contended view that a cause requires a universal rule.

We might, following Anscombe, reject the need for a universal law here. We might nevertheless hypothesise that there are physical descriptions of the movement of Jones hands and arms, together with the coincident working of his brain, that are the same as (token identical to…) the onset of the reason and the buttering of the toast.

In the subsequent paper Mental Events, Davidson said more about the nature of the relation between the physical description of the onset of the reason, and the description of that reason in terms of “I wanted buttered toast”: that every mental event is token-identical to some physical event, but there is no way of systematically translating mental descriptions into physical ones that would preserve the truth of strict laws linking them. that is “Anomalous Monism”.

For our purposes here, this is a seperate issue, in need of some detailed stocktaking. For now, we might agree that Davidson presents an excellent case for reasons counting as causes.

102

Anscombe’s “Causality and Determination” is central to my own thinking on causation. I’ve citing or linking to it repeatedly across many different threads and debates, concerning first causes, God arguments, determinism, materialism, and free will.

Anscombe is puzzling over what causation actually is, and concluding it is not material implication, modal necessity, nor statistical correlation. She uses the Wittgensteinian approach to rules in order to show that we can’t define causation precisely but rather “recognise it when we see it”. She distinguishes between causation and determination, and argues that determinism is an unnecessary or impossible goal for physics. This gives a way to resist the classical picture of the universe as a “clockwork mechanism,” opening room for free will without needing compatibilism.

The metaphysical payoff for me is to deflate cosmological/first-cause arguments; those arguments that link causation to the beginning of spacetime and invoke God, panpsychism, or Penrose largely fall to Anscombe’s account once determinism is questioned. Similarly, we can reject the maxim “everything in the universe has a cause,” a notion illegitimately imported from one domain into another.

My own extension of Anscombe’s position is to treat causation as neither purely “in the world” nor purely “in the word,” but as having a foot in both, being more a way of talking about the world, a grammar or logic that is presumed, with no further justification than its usefulness, but that dissipates when one attempts to examine it.

Do we need to say more?

I’ve turned thos into the opening of a new thread. Anscombe's "Causality and Determination"

103

But look at the discussion of “simples” in his rejection of the Tractatus, around §48 of PI. Wittgenstein assumed simples/objects as the bedrock from which propositions are built, but by the time of the PI he explicitly attacks that notion. At PI §48 the criticism of “simples” shows that what counts as simple - and hence what would count as identical with itself, or as the basic unit against which identity is judged - depends entirely on what activity one is engaged in, not on some antecedent metaphysical fact.

So rather than supplying criteria of identity, Wittgenstein’s later work dissolves the demand for them: What counts as a thing is a 'mental construct and what is to count as a simple depends on what one is doing. There’s a deep tendency for folk to choose this or that to be the ultimate simple, but any such choice will be relative to this or that activity - to some language game. The same point can be repeated with respect to essence: what we take as a simple depends on the task at hand. I read PI as a rejection of the Augustinian essentialism expressed in §1, a rejection of real essences. Even the seemingly “essential” property of a Bishop staying on its colour in chess is not to suppose something profound, but just to set out what we do.

The move from names to simples is also traced structurally: for the early Wittgenstein, simples were what had names (§46). So the discussion of simples does follow on naturally from the discussion of names - meaning the identity of a “simple” was tied, in the Tractatus, to naming, and PI undoes that tie by showing naming/simplicity is task-relative rather than fixed by some criteria.

In more formal first order logic this is reflected in their being differing domains of discourse, yet no overarching “domain of everything”.

Wittgenstein does not articulate stable criteria of identity for simples; his later position (via the §46-48 discussion) is precisely that no such criteria can be given independently of the language-game or activity in question - identity/simplicity is relative to use, not a metaphysical given.

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104

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The left is Melden’s picture, the right is Davidson’s.

The problem with the picture on the left is that if a reason is to explain an action, that action must happen because of that reason, since anything less fails to provide the link between reason and action that is required in order that a reason be an explanation for an action. You pulled on your jumper because it was cold, otherwise we just have it being cold, and unrelated, you putting on your jumper. Did you wave your hand to swat the fly, or was that an accident, and you waived it because you intended to signal?

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105

Yes, excellent diagrams, and the one on the left shows the problem clearly. Reason and cause can’t “free-float” if a reason is to both explain and cause an action.

Looking at this, it got me wondering whether, if the explanandum was strictly physical – the formation of an ion, say – we’d still need both a reason and a cause. What do you think? Certainly it wouldn’t be a reason in the same way we speak of a human’s reason for action. But it is how we talk: "The reason the ion formed was that . . . "

106

I peeled off the Anscombe article into a separate thread and was about to do the same with The Logical Form of Action Sentences, only to discover that, for some odd reason, @Jamal has allowed us only one new thread a day. Oh well.

Can the formation of an ion be described in terms of a pro-attitude and a belief? That’s perhaps the sort of explanation we get from @Wayfarer.

107

Well, no. That’s why I said that it would need to be a different construal of “reason,” more along the lines of what we mean when we talk about “the reason why the ion formed.”

In such a case, are “reason” and “cause” just synonyms? Let me switch to a more everyday example.

“The strong wind caused the rock to roll downhill”; “The reason the rock rolled downhill was that a strong wind pushed it down.”

Are these two sentences saying exactly the same thing?

108

Sure, we can do that. Davidson is quite specific in using “reason” in this context as involving pro-attitudes together with beliefs. It’s here a term of art:

What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent’s reason for doing what he did?

The wind doesn’t get to explain its action in rolling the rock down the hill by giving its reasons. So yours is a very pertinent point: why do we not entreat the wind for such reasoning? How does it get away with it?

109

Right. What is it about justification that is peculiar to human reasons, but would be silly when applied to the wind? The wind was a cause, perhaps a reason in the sense I’m using it – but is this a justification? Never. Explanation has a very different structure for what rocks do than for a human action.

110

The line I draw between material causation and intentionality is with the formation of organisms. That is where the most rudimentary form of intentionality begins to manifest, although it takes billions of years to evolve into sentient conscious awareness. But the elemental form of intentionality is not something reducible to the simply physical, as there’s nothing in phyics (or chemistry) which equates with it. The most elementary characteristic of an organism is that it acts to maintain itself, which no mineral does.

Humans can act in accordance with reasons because they’re capable of envisaging different courses of actions. They can ‘peer into possibility’ so to speak and try to retrieve from the domain of possibility a preferred outcome.

111

…and I immediately regret the mention, it having elicited your standard vitalist gambit: locate a metaphysical threshold at “organism” and declare it unbridgeable by physics, then let that the second, unearned step of “self-maintenance implies incipient intentionality” smuggle in exactly what needs to be shown: that self-maintaining behaviour in organisms is or constitutes an elementary form of intentionality. In positing a separation of word and world you set yourself the impossible task of explaining their interaction.

112

I don’t think it’s impossible, although I agree that the nature of life itself may remain inscrutable. But your problem is that it can’t be accomodated by the implicit naturalism of analytical philosophy. But nearly all the issues involved could be resolved by re-introducting formal and final causation as explanatory factors.

113

Furthermore it’s not ‘vitalism’. The emergence of living systems marks the first appearance of behaviour that is intrinsically organised around its own continued existence. Whether we call that the earliest form of intentionality or the biological precursor of intentionality is a further question, but it is precisely that transition that requires explanation in terms other than physics, although not in terms of anything like a ‘vital force’. But then, I’ve been reading enactivism and phenomenology, which has a different perspective to analytic philosophy

114

You’re not actually addressing the topic here, nor are your just-so stories progressing the account. A promissory note doesn’t pay the account.

115

I know you like everyone to stay in their lanes, so I’ll bow out of this one.

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116

May I just offer my own thoughts on what’s been said in the thread? If I misunderstood the gist, please simply ignore my reply.

If we’re considering a thinking being, then it’s precisely their way of thinking that leads to the discovery of the cause. That is, it’s truly a rationalization of their actions, the result of their thinking. In this particular case, the thinking being’s decision about what was the cause isn’t equivalent to the cause itself; it’s merely a guess, which could prove incorrect.

117

Perhaps we should seperate out that A caused B from “Angel believes that A caused B”. These are not the same. Our beliefs can be wrong.

That points to a difficulty with the various forms of idealism and antirealism; if all there is to being true, is what we believe, then how is it that we can be mistaken as to what is true? In order for us to be mistaken, it seems we must believe to be true something that is not true.

But that is not what this thread is about.

118

Apparently, we will simply have to separate the concept of truth from probable truth.

119

Well, we ought at least seperate what is true from what we believe - probable or not.

120

If we approach things this way, then truth is fundamentally unattainable, because we are incapable of seeing anything without the lens of our own certainty.