1.Event-Causal Model of Human Agency and Its Difficulties
Davidson proposes a ‘single line’ event-causal model of human agency, attempting to bring intentional states and actions into a single causal chain: an agent’s intentional states (or events), such as beliefs, desires and intentions, cause some bodily movement called ‘basic action’ to happen. There are different descriptions of this basic action, and under some of them, this action is intentional. (Davidson 2001/1963, 2001/1971) Even though it is often believed that intentional states cannot be causes, it will not be a problem for Davidson. According to his theory of anomalous monism (Davidson 2001/1970), intentional states are causes because they are token identical to physical states, and certainly, physical states are causes. The descriptions of mental states, either mental or physical, are simply irrelevant to causing actions. We have different descriptions of the …show more content…
Even if intentional explanation of my action cannot influence what I have done, it certainly can influence what I will do next. Different kinds of rationalization of the same action have significantly different influences on subsequent actions. Rationalization is an activity that plays a vital role in human agency; they are not irrelevant linguistic descriptions. For example, for your behavior of eating dog meat, if it cannot be justified in a society where people love dogs, you probably will not eat it again; but it might not be the same in another society. In short, human agency is reflective: we can reflectively response to the explanation and evaluation of our previous behaviors. However, this characteristic of human agency can hardly be taken into account by ECM since there are only events in the ontology of ECM, but only persistent agents can response to evaluations of previous
Davidson proposes a ‘single line’ event-causal model of human agency, attempting to bring intentional states and actions into a single causal chain: an agent’s intentional states (or events), such as beliefs, desires and intentions, cause some bodily movement called ‘basic action’ to happen. There are different descriptions of this basic action, and under some of them, this action is intentional. (Davidson 2001/1963, 2001/1971) Even though it is often believed that intentional states cannot be causes, it will not be a problem for Davidson. According to his theory of anomalous monism (Davidson 2001/1970), intentional states are causes because they are token identical to physical states, and certainly, physical states are causes. The descriptions of mental states, either mental or physical, are simply irrelevant to causing actions. We have different descriptions of the …show more content…
Even if intentional explanation of my action cannot influence what I have done, it certainly can influence what I will do next. Different kinds of rationalization of the same action have significantly different influences on subsequent actions. Rationalization is an activity that plays a vital role in human agency; they are not irrelevant linguistic descriptions. For example, for your behavior of eating dog meat, if it cannot be justified in a society where people love dogs, you probably will not eat it again; but it might not be the same in another society. In short, human agency is reflective: we can reflectively response to the explanation and evaluation of our previous behaviors. However, this characteristic of human agency can hardly be taken into account by ECM since there are only events in the ontology of ECM, but only persistent agents can response to evaluations of previous