ABSTRACT
Philosophy and common sense both distinguish actions from mere happenings. Having an apple fall on your head is a mere happening. Jumping over a crack in the sidewalk is an action. We also distinguish actions – properly so-called – from mere behaviors, which are not mere happenings but also don’t rise to the level of actions. Reflexively scrunching your face when you see a disgusting picture involves emotion and information-processing, so it is more than a mere happening. But it unfolds automatically and often without awareness, making it less than action. Actions form a proper subset of behaviors, which form a proper subset of happenings. Philosophy of action, as one would expect, seeks to answer at least two questions. What
constitutes action? What causes action? To date, the most prevalent theory of action – both its constitution and its etiology – is
belief-desire explanation, which emerges from works of David Hume and Donald Davidson; it is also the basic framework for decision theory. Beliefs and desires, on this theory, cause and rationalize actions that can be expected to satisfy the desires, if the beliefs are true. Example. Belief: pushing COKE releases a soda from the machine. Desire: I drink soda. Caused action: pushing COKE. Thus are actions caused. Furthermore, many think this is a constitutive theory of action as well. Actions are those events caused in this fashion. (Reflexively scrunching your face seems not to have a belief-desire explanation; nor does it seem to deserve the label “action”; so the belief-desire theory seems to classify it correctly. Conversely, pushing COKE is an action.) The belief-desire theory looms so large that one is tempted to ignore or deny the possibility
that other mental states are central to the etiology or constitution of action. Much literature scarcely mentions other mental states. And some papers even argue against positing other mental states as contributors to action. Neil Sinhababu (2013), for example, argues against positing intention over and above beliefs and desires. And Peter Langland-Hassan (2012) argues that actions involved in pretending, which would seem to require imagining, don’t in fact employ a distinct cognitive attitude of imagining; he thinks one can make do with positing only conditional beliefs and desires.1
