The Logical Character of Action-Explanations

Paul M. Churchland

The Philosophical Review, Vol. 79, No. 2. (Apr., 1970), pp. 214-236.

Stable URL:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108%28197004%2979%3A2%3C214%3ATLCOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J

The Philosophical Review is currently published by Cornell University.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtainedprior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/journals/sageschool.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. Formore information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www.jstor.orgSat May 12 00:24:33 2007

THE LOGICAL CHARACTER O F ACTION-EXPLANATIONS1

IS I T THE CASE that garden-variety explanations of human actions-explanations in terms of wants, beliefs, and so on-

are sketches or enthymemes of deductive-nomological arguments ? A considerable number of contemporary writers maintain that they are not. Some claim that there simply are no empirical laws governing human action as a function of configurations of mental states and/or episodes, or at least that if there are such laws, the ordinary man is quite ignorant of them. Indeed, some insist that, for purely logical reasons, there could not possibly be any empiri- cal laws connecting wants and the like with actions. Accordingly, we are invited to embrace various alternative theories as to the logical character of action-explanations. By some it is argued that action-explanations are an instance of a general type of explana- tion distinct from the D-N (or at least from the causal) type (for example, Charles Taylor2 and Alan Donagans) ;others claim that action-explanations are of a distinct and unique type in themselves (for example, A. I. Melden4 and William Dray5). I cannot hope to examine all of them, but one of the more inter- esting of these alternative theories will receive critical attention in the latter part of this essay. My immediate aim is to make a prima-facie case in favor of the view that action-explanations are indeed of the familiar D-N mold. This sort of task has been made less arduous than it might have been by Donald Davidson's most enlightened attack on many of the standard arguments

1 A major acknowledgment is owed to Miss Patricia Smith. Most of the major details in what follows were forged in conversations with her during the summer of 1968.

2 The Explanation of Behaviour (London, I 964). 8 "Explanation in History," in Theories of History, ed. by Patrick Gardiner

(Glencoe, Ill., 1959). Free Action (London, I 96I ).

6 See esp. "The Historical Explanation of Action Reconsidered," in Philosophy and History, ed. by Sidney Hook (New York, I 963).

-- -

ACTION-EXPLANATIONS

against the causal theory of action- explanation^;^ unfortunately, Davidson makes only a minimum positive contribution with respect to outlining the structural details of our explanatory capacity in this area, apparently regarding it as consisting of only the most inchoate of insights into possible and probable nomic connections. I shall try to make out that, on the contrary, there are some fairly sophisticated nomic principles or "laws" specijically presupposed by our ordinary action-explanations, and that a variety of interesting features of action-explanations can be clearly understood when this background structure is brought to light.

That our ordinary explanatory practices with respect to human actions are presumptive of what is prima facie a general law can fairly easily be brought to light by a systematic exami- nation of those practices. Any adequate theory of the logical character of action-explanations must be able to account for the undoubted propriety of the various types of everyday objections to which they can be subject, and this fact provides us with a strategy for winnowing out the underlying law, if it happens there is one. We need only examine and classify the types of objection which can legitimately be raised against an ordinary explanatory statement of the form "XA-ed because he wanted ~ 3 ' ' ~in order to bring out the entire set of necessary conditions (short of the law itself, it being, presumably, immune from casual denial) for the correctness of that explanatory statement. If action-explanations are sketches of D-N arguments, then there must be some putative law which sanctions an inference from the conjunction of these explanatory conditions to the desired explanandum, "X A-ed." Presumably, it will simply be a universal conditional containing the conjunction of these explanatory con- ditions as its antecedent, and "XA-s" as its consequent. The strategy is to winnow out, from examples of objections, these implied but usually unstated explanatory conditions, construct

"Actions, Reasons, and Causes," Journal of Philosophy, LX ( I 963). 7 One can substitute for 0 here anything that fits. In what follows, however,

I shall understand it as running surrogate for the completely general "that P (be the case)." In one indirect way or another, wants, like beliefs, are all identified by reference to some specific proposition.

PAUL M. CHURCHLAND

the universal conditional as indicated, and see whetherwerecognize it as a nomological, as a true, nontrivial, unrestricted universal conditional capable of supporting subjunctive conditionals. One look may not suffice to settle the issue, but if it does so appear, the conflict will be usefully joined.

Such a strategy is simple and potentially decisive, but for a variety of reasons it is difficult to carry through cleanly. First, the ways in which one can object to an explanatory statement of the form "X A-ed because he wanted 0"are legion, a consequence of the fact that one can object by denying anything which, in context, is implied by any one or any conjunction of the basic explanatory conditions (the singular premises in the relevant form of D-N argument). The filtering out of these basic explanatory conditions is therefore something less than a mechanical process. Prospects for immediate and clear-cut success are further clouded by the possibility that the putative law we seek to unearth is, in fact, very much a law sketch,8 and that one or more of the corresponding explanatory conditions may therefore be vague and hence somewhat elusive. And lastly, it appears that there are, in addition to the normal case, two or three slightly aberrant cases of "intentional action," and that there are distinct though only slightly different sets of correctness conditions on explanatory statements appropriate to each of these kinds of cases. To make anything approaching an irrefragable case for the specific conditions to which I have been led would therefore require a dismal number of examples, and the following minimum set must be viewed as being merely illustrative of (what I take to be) the basic explanatory conditions in the normal case. The reader can check them out and perhaps improve upon them by stumping through further examples of his own contrivance.

In the normal case, if one says, "X A-ed because he wanted 0 ," one implies that ( I ) X wanted %, and (2) X believed (judged, saw) that A-ing was, under the circumstances, a means for him to achieve %, an action which would achieve % or contribute to his achievement of % .One's explanatory statement would normally be defeated if either of these were shown to be false. Is anything

This notion will be made clearer presently.

ACTION-EXPLANA TIONS

further implied by such an explanatory statement? Apparently so. Suppose the following conversation to take place at a noisy party.

P: "Why did Peter crook his finger back and forth like that?"

Q: "Well, he wanted Mary to come across the room to him, and, strangely enough, he thought that would bring her."

P: "Yes, I know he wants very badly for Mary to come over and be sociable to him-and don't you kid yourself, because Mary would come at the crook of his finger, and he knows it-but Peter has a lot more style than that: he'd have called her over with a fetching grin or some such, not a crooking finger. He must have been calling Bill over; he's standing over there with Mary."

In this case, neither of the explanatory propositions-(I) and (2)-put forth by Qis denied by P. What is denied is that they explain or are relevant to the explanation of Peter's crooking his finger. The point of the objection is this: if, at the time at which Peter was in fact crooking his finger he had been doing something as a means to fulfilling his desire for Mary's company, then that something would not have been his crooking his finger, but something else-his smiling fetchingly at her or some such. And the general point behind this claim seems to be that if he had been doing something as a means to the desire cited, then that some- thing would have been the means he thought or took to be the most preferable to him, all things considered, of the means he thought open to him. P's objection is simply that, in virtue of being presumptuously blatant, crooking his finger was unlikely to have been the means thought of or judged by (stylish) Peter as the means most preferable to him of the means he thought open to him, given that he was in fact aware of other alternatives, and hence most unlikely that e s explanation is correct.

What this example illustrates is the following apparently general truth. If one says, "X A-ed because he wanted 0 ," one has made a true statement only if (3) there was no other action believed by X to be a means for him to bring about 0, under the circumstances, which X judged to be as preferable to him as, or more preferable to him than, A-ing.

Further implications can be brought to light in the same

PAUL M. CHURCHLAND

pre-theoretical manner. Suppose that P had objected to c s explanation not as above, but as follows.

P: "No, no, that can't be right. Peter knows that Jack is watching him very closely, and he also knows that the jealous ruffian would cause a fearful row if he tried in any way to gain Mary's company. I'm sure Peter does want Mary's company, and I agree that crooking his finger is just what the graceless fool would do, but I'm sure the whole thing isn't worth an ugly scene to him. He must have been calling Bill; he's standing over there with Mary."

As before, P does not deny ( I ) or (2), and in this case P even agrees that crooking his finger is precisely the means Peter would have (and perhaps has) judged most preferable to him of the means (to bring Mary over) currently open to him. This time the objection is to the effect that Peter had a further desire which, under the pregnant circumstances, overrode his desire to bring Mary over. In brief, Peter would rather bide his time than precipitate a scene, and he judges the former to be the price of avoiding the latter. The general lesson here is roughly this: if one says, "X A-ed because he wanted 0," one has made a true statement only if (4) X had no other want (or set of them) which, under the circumstances, overrode his want 0.

Now suppose the following objection raised against c s explana- tion.

R: "I'm afraid that's quite wrong. You see, Peter is subject to an unfortunate variety of nervous paralysis which comes and goes quite without warning. One can tell when an attack hits him because his eyes droop glassily and his finger twitches spasmodi- cally. He may have been about to crook his finger, doubtless for the very reasons you mention, just as the attack came, but with it came a complete inability to control any part of his body. His finger did crook, perhaps right on time, but Peter didn't crook it: I saw his eyes droop glassily the instant before his finger began to move."

Unlike the previous objections, this is not just a challenge to the offered explanation in particular; it is a challenge to the propriety of an action-explanation in the case at issue. It denies that Peter

ACTION-EXPLANATIONS

crooked his finger-in the full-blooded sense that would merit an explanation of the sort offered by Q-on the grounds that he was unable to crook his finger. The lesson here is simply this: to give an action-explanation is to imply that the agent had the ability to perform the alleged action being explained. That is, if one says, "X A-ed because he wanted 0,"one has made a true statement only if (6) Xwas able to A.

Finally, consider the following conversation.

P: "1 just saw John dial Bill's number on the telephone. Why do you suppose he did that ?"

Q: "What's the problem? He wanted to talk with Bill. He thought dialing Bill's number the best way to achieve this under the circumstances-Bill went back upstairs to his office, you know-and since no other desire(s) overrode that inclination, he, being able, went ahead and dialed Bill's number !"

R: "That's not quite right. John believes that Bill's number is extension 3, whereas of course it is 2. You are right about his wants, beliefs, preferences, and abilities, and Bill's number did get dialed by John, but the pencil must have slipped in his hand as he went to dial 3, Bill's real number, 2, being dialed only acciden- tally. I t rather looked like it, you'll notice, for John hung up immediately and dialed again."

Because John was mistaken as to how (or what it was) to dial Bill's number, he cannot properly be said to have dialed Bill's number in the full-blooded sense to which JL's explanation would have been appropriate, even though, as it chanced, Bill's number did get dialed by John. In this respect the case is like the preceding e ~ a m p l e , ~ for the relevant condition here is perhaps best described as a condition on the propriety of an action-explana- tion (for the action under the description at issue). The general

I might mention that I have switched examples here (from the finger- crooking case) for reasons of simplicity only. I t would have been prima facie desirable to hold the example constant for all six conditions, but since one can imagine being able to crook one's finger, but not knowing how and, further, doing it accidentally anyway, only in the most unusual and complicated cases, time and space would seem to justify illustrating the point with a more man- ageable example.

PAUL M. CHURCHLAND

lesson here is roughly this: if one says, "X A-ed because he wanted 0 ,"one has made a true statement only if it is the case that (5) X knew how to A (or, at least, that X's belief or judgment, concern- ing how, in those circumstances, to A, was correct).1°

An interesting, but mistaken, objection is possible here. One might suppose that it would be correct to say, "X A-ed because he wanted % ," if X A-ed, in complete ignorance of that fact, in the belief that he was B-ing, and where in fact he B-ed because he wanted %. If this were correct, it would undercut more than just condition ( 5 ) , but one need only consider an example to see that there is something wrong with this suggestion. Suppose that X brings the water to the boil because he wants to make a cup of coffee. Now in bringing the water to the boil, he therein raised its vapor pressure to equal atmospheric pressure (Pa) ;but suppose he is quite ignorant of this fact, not knowing even what vapor pressure is. That is, he does not know how (or what it is) to raise the water's vapor pressure to Pa. Clearly then, there is something wrong with saying that X raised the water's vapor pressure to Pa because he wanted to make a cup of coffee, because he did not < < raise the vapor pressure to Pa" in the full-blooded sense relevant. That is, the question of why he did that is curiously inappropriate to his having raised the water's vapor pressure to Pain a way that it is not inappropriate to his having brought it to the boil. On the other hand, we do feel that X's desire for a cup of coffee is in some way explanatory of his having raised the water's vapor pressure to Pa. This awkwardness is partly a result (as we shall see) of simple D-N opacity,ll but there is more involved here than just this. I shall try to explain this curious awkwardness presently. First, let me summarize the putative results to this point. If

loA simpler position, perhaps, would be not to treat (5 ) as a distinct condi- tion at all: in the strongest sense of "is able," condition (6 ) already includes condition (5 )along with the obvious conditions of opportunity and nonpreven- tion. One can, as it were, peel off "layers" of ability. Condition (5) is, however, less unspecific than those other two "layers," and so I shall treat it as a distinct condition. Condition (6 ) is thus to be understood in its correspondingly weaker sense.

l1 For a lucid discussion of explanatory opacity, see Israel Scheffler, 77ze Anatomy of Inquiry (New York, I 963).

ACTION-EXPLANATIONS

one says, "X A-ed because he wanted 0,'' one has made a true statement if (apparently) and only if:

( I ) X wanted 0,and (2) X believed (judged, saw) that A-ing was a way for him to

achieve 0 under those circumstances, and (3) there was no action believed by X to be a way for him to

bring about 0 , under those circumstances, which X judged to be as preferable to him as, or more preferable to him than, A-ing, and

(4) X had no other want (or set of them) which, under the circumstances, overrode his want 0,and

(5) X knew how to A, and (6) X was able to A.

All this is, in a sense, common knowledge. Few of us could produce this list on demand, but we all know how to criticize statements of the form "X A-ed because he wanted 0," and we would not offer such a statement if we knew that any one of ( I )

through (6) were false. But why these conditions? Why is it that we accept or reject explanatory statements of the sort at issue as a function of our beliefs or suppositions concerning the truth or falsity of precisely the set ( I ) through (6) ? One possible answer will recommend itself strongly if the following conditional can plausibly be seen as being nomological in character.

L,: (X) ( 0 ) (A) (1f[1] Xwants 0, and [2] X believes that A-ing is a way for him to bring

about 0 under those circumstances, and [3] there is no action believed by X to be a way for

him to bring about 0, under the circumstances, which X judges to be as preferable to him as, or more preferable to him than, A-ing, and

[4] X has no other want (or set of them) which, under the circumstances, overrides his want 0,and

[5] X knows how to A, and

PAUL M. CHURCHLAND

[6] Xis able to A,12 then [7] X A-s.)

As the outcome of the strategy outlined above, L, is, for the causal theorist, a highly encouraging result. Clause (4) is, to be sure, a bit of a "cheat," as is clause (6), but I should insist in the first place that said cheats are not mine, but ours, and in the second place that such cheats are quite benign and extremely common. Consider the following examples.

(a) If a bar magnet is placed under a flat surface on which iron filings are evenly spread, then, if there are no other significant forces on the filings, they will shift into a pattern of whorls oriented on the line of the bar.

(b) If a sulphur-phosphorus match is struck, then, barring vitiating factors, it will burn.

Similar cheats are instanced in both cases, but these law sketches are quite fit for supporting garden-variety explanations ("Well, you see, the tip was a mixture of sulphur and phosphorus .. .") and counterfactual conditionals ("If those filings had been iron instead of copper . . ."). Gaps and fuzzy areas in our knowl- edge of nomic connections are standardly filled with such ceteris paribus clauses.13 In some cases these clauses are highly informa- tive; in other cases, less so, right down to the limiting case of the completely unspecific "barring vitiating factors." But conditionals thus compromised are not thereby rendered unfit for explanatory use. The incompleteness of our knowledge of the minor or less obvious details of many (most) nomic connections merely reflects one more degree of sketchiness from which a D-.N argument may suffer: the major premise may be a law sketch.

la The sense of ability intended here is that of ability in a particular set of circumstances, the "all-in" sense. Also, I should point out that to claim nomic status for L, is to take sharp issue with J. L. Austin's conviction that "a human ability. .. is inherently liable not to produce success, on occasion, and that for no reason" (italics mine). See "Ifs and Cans," in Philosophical Papers (Oxford, I 96I), p. 166.

l3The present state of natural science allows us to state much more elegant and detailed versions of (a) and ( b ) , but our ability to construct explanation sketches of the relevant types of phenomena did not await our present level of sophistication.

ACTION-EXPLANATIONS

But to more important matters: given the conceptual role ascribed to L,, it must be the case that the "reflective normal speaker" would assent to L,. People of this description have been quite accommodating, but among my super-reflective philosophi- cal colleagues the reactions, understandably, have been less uniformly encouraging. Some assent warily; others assent, but insist that L, is flatly analytic and hence unfit for the type of explanatory role ascribed to it; and still others dissent, pleading akrasia. I shall try to deal with this latter complaint first.

The complaint, as I have received it, is that there clearly could be, and probably are, cases where ( I ) through (6) are true of some X, and yet X fails to A. The objection continues with the claim that the only way to salvage the truth of L, is to add the clause "X is completely rational" to its antecedent, in which case L, is transformed into a flatly analytic truth and we are back with the first objection.

The objection that the antecedent of L, could be true of some X without issuing in the relevant action represents the tip of a very large iceberg; in the present context, however, the following considerations will suffice to deal with it. First, if the objection is conceived as an objection from akrasia, it seems to me it is misconceived. The phenomena we might wish to collect under the term "akrasia" are more plausibly located not in the causal tangle comprehended by L,, but rather in the prior (causal) processes of the practical deliberations that result in clauses (3) and/or (4) being true. That is, if "akrasia" is to be given an interesting use at all, it would seem more likely to be useful as descriptive of an inability to reach unqualified practical conclusions rather than as descriptive of a curious and distinct form of "inability" (or whatever) to act once such conclusions are reached. In that case, akrasia would represent no threat to the truth of L,.

Secondly, we must respect the distinction between defending (the truth of) a putative law sketch apparently presupposed by our explanatory practices, and defending the claim that some particular putative law sketch is presupposed by our explanatory practices as a true law sketch. I t is this latter claim I am defending. L, may indeed be, in the final empirical analysis, false. Suppose

PAUL M. CHURCHLAND

that, because of something we might wish to term "akrasia," it is. This would undermine the claim being defended only if one could be sure that the collective wisdom of the human race is sufficiently great that no false proposition could ever come to underlie our common explanatory practices. This point, I confess, would not be worth making if it were quite obvious that L, is false, but I find this to be very much less than obvious. If clauses ( I ) through (6) are taken seriously, it seems difficult even to imagine a case which would counterinstance L,: clauses (4) and (6) in particular are voraciously subsumptive of putative counterexamples. It seems difficult even to conceive of an individual of whom L, is false and still conceive of that individual as having wants and preferences at all. But perhaps my imagination is constrained by an overdose of conceptual conservativism; suppose so. That one can conceive of circumstances which would falsify L, does not entail that such circumstances could (empirically could) obtain; and further, even if such circumstances could (empirically could) or do obtain, this does not by itself entail that L, is not presupposed by our ordinary explanatory practices as a true law sketch.

Thirdly, the preceding is largely by the by. Even if the ordinary man is in some sense cognizant of an "akrasial" gap (distinct from the gap represented by the ability clause) in his understanding of how persons function, the mechanics of his ordinary explanatory practices will still be perfectly explicable on the assumption of his implicit use of L, if we add a completely unspecific "barring vitiating factors" clause to its antecedent. L, would thus be one degree sketchier than first represented, but that is no problem. If akrasia, of a sort inimical to L,, is a part of (better: gap in) the ordinary man's understanding of how persons function, a minor addition to L, will include that factor in the story of that under- standing.14

l4 A libertarian will insist that ak~asiarepresents not a gap in our under- standing of the mental state/ behavior function, but rather an in principle unfillable gap in that so-called function. Aside from the difficulty of justifying such an insistence, we should note that even if the claim were true, this would not entail the desired indeterminism. I t would entail only that the conceptual framework in terms of which we now understand the "workings" of humans is, at bottom, inadequate to the phenomena (is an explanatory failure), and should be replaced by some more successful explanatory framework.

ACTION-EXPLANATIONS

The objection that L, is flatly analytic (and hence unfit, and so on) may appear to be a serious one given the confessed difficulty of conceiving a falsifying instance. The objection is highly welcome, however, for its apparent seriousness is readily undermined: on the view being proposed, the appeal of the objection is quite understandable. After all, the suggestion is that L, is a deeply entrenched theoretical nomological central to our understanding both of human behavior and of such states as wanting, believing, and preferring-a basic principle of the conceptual framework in terms of which we conceive ourselves. I t is difficult, perhaps impossible, to deny L, without undermining the conceptual machinery which makes such understanding possible or, better, constitutes it, but none of this entails that L, is "analytic" in any sense inconsistent with its being nomological in character. One could not deny the principle of mass-energy con- servation without threatening similar havoc in the conceptual framework of modern physical theory, and one would encounter similar difficulties in trying to describe a noncontroversial case which would falsify that principle. If there are any relevant differences between these two cases, they are differences only in degree.

What we must appreciate is that to claim nomic status for L, is not to put it on a par with, say, "All copper expands when heated": nomicity does not require that the universal in question be falsifiable independently of the entire framework of principles of which it may be an integr~l part (even the example just given is, nowadays, deeply embedded in atomic theory). We can concede that the rejection of L, would entail serious conceptual readjust- ments, but conceptual change is characteristic of theoretical change, and the status claimed for L, is that of a theoretical nomo-logical. To some, this may seem a bizarre proposal, but the following considerations will demonstrate its innocence.

The particular view of action-explanations being defended is but one aspect of the more general view that the common-sense conceptual framework in terms of which we conceive ourselves, qua persons, has all the relevant structural and logical features of those lesser conceptual frameworks we call scientific theories (for example, molecular theory). This may smack of John Stuart

PAUL M.CHURCHLAND

Mill and the less than venerable argument from analogy, but the resemblance is superficial. On this more recent view, psychological predicates are held to be given an implicit (partial) definition by the set of nomic principles in which they figure, and the justification of this "Person-Theory of Humans" is held to be not that one introspects that it is true of one's own case and observes that the behavior of other humans is similar to one's own, but rather that the theory is explanatorily successful with respect to the relevant subject matter-specifically, the behavior of humans in general.15 A complete exposition of our conceptual framework for persons-the framework comprehending all psychological predicates-would therefore contain a large number of principles ("conceptual truths") which are nomic rather than "merely analytic" in character. There is certainly nothing bizarre in this proposal: whether a principle, such as L,, enjoys nomic status is a function of the kind of role it plays in our judg- ments (explanatory or otherwise) concerning matters of fact; whether, in the peripatetics of our conscious reasonings, it plays this role explicitly or only implicitly is another matter entirely.

With these difficulties at least temporarily surmounted we can now examine some of the positive virtues of understanding action-explanations in the way suggested. The primary virtue is that the view proposed is explanatory of our ordinary explanatory practices-and indeed, of our explanatory capacity--with respect to human actions. If L, has, in normal speakers, the psychological status of an inference rule, but-from a logical or epistemo-logical point of view-plays the conceptual role of a nomological, that we should accept and reject explanatory statements of the form "X A-ed because he wanted 0" as a function of our supposi- tions concerning the truth of ( I ) through (6) is perfectly under- standable: the acceptability of such statements is a function of the soundness of the specific D-JVarguments they sketch.

From this perspective we can also understand why condi- tions (5) and (6) appeared as conditions on the propriety of an

l6 Cf. Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," in Science, Perception, and Reality (London, 1963); also, C. S. Chihara and J. A. Fodor, "Operationalism and Ordinary Language: a Critique of Wittgenstein," American Philosophical Quarterly, 2 ( I 965).

ACTION-EXPLANATIONS

action-explanation of X's A-ing. One can object to an action- explanation E(0 , ) by denying one of the relevant instances of ( I ) to (4), which make reference to the want or aim a,, while still leaving open the possibility that some other action-explana- tion E(0 , ) is the correct explanation of why X A-ed. But con- ditions (5) and (6) make no reference to the want or aim cited in ( I ) through (4). Accordingly, to deny (5) or (6) is to deny that any action-explanation E(rai) of why X A-ed is correct, since (5) and (6) are constants for any action-explanation E(00 of why X A-ed. This is, surely, the major reason why conditions (5) and (6) are never cited when action-explanations are given. As we shall see, this is also why (5) and (6) are conditions on the truth of "X A-ed," in the full-blooded sense of that expression (or rather, of its substitution instances). They are not, note, conditions on the truth of the weaker sense; recall the examples illustrating (5) and (6).

To this point certain complexities have been avoided by pleading attention to the "normal" cases of action-explanation. In fact, L, is not the only principle that plays an explanatory role in this area: appropriate to the relevant types of mildly aberrant cases are the following conditionals.

L,: (X) (A) (If [1'] Xwants to A, and [4'] X has no further desire (or set of them) which,

under the circumstances, overrides his desire to A, and

[5I and [6I 2

then [7] XA-s.)

L, can perhaps be viewed as the degenerate case of L,- the case, that is, where "0" is "that X A-s"-and the trivialized clauses, (2) and (3), are dropped. Further, when we examine cases where the explanatory statement at issue has the form "X tried to A because he wanted 0," I think we find that con- ditions ( I ) to (4) are the necessary and apparently sufficient conditions for correctness. Conveniently, L, has a further, weaker cousin.

then [7'] X tries to A.)

PAUL M. CHURCHLASD

These conditionals share a most intriguing feature: from the wants, beliefs, and preferences ascribed to the agent in the antecedent of each conditional, a valid practical argument leads to a conclusion in favor of doing or undertaking the action in question. In the case of L,, the corresponding practical argument would be, I take it, roughly as follows.

(a) I want 0 . (b) A-ing is a way for me to bring about 0 under these

circumstances. (c) There is no other way to bring about 0 now open to me

which is as preferable to me as, or more preferable to me than, A-ing.

(d) There is no sufficient reason for me not to act to bring about 0 under these circumstances.

Therefore, (e) Let me A.

That is, the agent is so characterized in the antecedent that the action mentioned in the consequent is characterized as being, from the agent's (perhaps narrow and confused) point of view, the uniquely reasonable action under the circumstances. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that, in the case of action-explana- tions, the explanandum-action can be described as reasonable or appropriate in the light of the wants, beliefs, and so on ascribed to the agent in the explanans. This sort of "reasonable-in-the-light-of" relation between explanandum and explanans in the case of action-explanations has been pointed out before, most notably by those who would champion the notion that this relation is the unique explanatory relation instanced in action-explanations. How seriously this notion is mistaken will become clear shortly.

The preceding suggests a highly plausible criterion for picking out what we might intuitively term "full-blooded actions." I t is a common intuition, one most of us have been taught to repress, that to be an action is to be caused by an intention, or by the resolution of a process of deliberation, or by some such. The obvious difficulty is that we can readily think of a variety of things which are or might be caused thusly, but which are not actions. The intuition may persist nonetheless with the modifi-

ACTION-EXPLANATIONS

cation that to be an action is to have been caused in the right sort of way by some such inner event, but the prospects of making the relevant relation clear seem dim indeed. If we shift our mode of speech, however, the following criterion suggests itself. To say that an event-description of the general form "X A-ed" is a description of a full-blooded action is to say that the event under that description takes a cevtain kind of explanation-speci-fically, one in terms of L, and the corresponding singular con- ditions (or in terms of L,, and so forth, or L,, and so forth), simpliciter.le (I think this criterion is acceptable, but since L, may have more cousins than L, and L,, perhaps the following more general criterion is more accurate. An event-description of the general form "X A-ed" is a description of a full-blooded action if and only if there exists an explanans deductively entailing "X ~ - e d " such that (a) from the wants, beliefs, preferences, and whatnot ascribed to X in the explanans, a valid practical argu- ment yields a conclusion in favor of A-ing, and (b) the explanans contains but one law [or law sketch], a law which is a part of the common-sense theoretical framework and which embodies the corresponding "reasonable-in-the-light-of y relation1' between the wants, preferences, and whatnot ascribed in its antecedent and the action mentioned in its consequent, and (c) the explanans meets all the standard D-JV criteria for explanatory adequacy.) This criterion, while entirely in keeping with the spirit of its specious predecessor, is quite immune from its classic criticism.

We can be encouraged in this general view by the fact that it allows us to account for a curious twofold opacity in the explanan- dum of an action-explanation. We noted earlier that an explanans adequate for the explanandum "X brought the water to the boil" (for example, the explanans consisting of Ll and the substitution instances of [I] through [6]for "X wants a cup of coffee" and "bringing the water to the boil") is not an explanans which

laThe point of the "simpliciter" is to rule out devious deductive routes to the explanandum, the point of this being to guarantee that the required "reason- able-in-the-light-of" relation holds between explanandum and explanans.

l7 Lacking a general theory of practical inference, I can only appeal to our intuitive understanding of this relation.

PAUL M. CHURCHLAND

explains that event under the description "X raised the water's vapor pressure to Pa." This is partly a result of simple D-N opacity; that is, the event under the latter description is not a logical consequence of the explanans (E) cited. But the opacity runs deeper than this. If we construct a second explanans, E', from E, by adding the identity statement "to bring water to the boil is to raise water's vapor pressure to Pa" to E, we should then have an adequate explanation of why X raised the vapor pressure to Pa, because the event under this latter description is a logical consequence of E', and E' meets the standard D-N conditions for adequacy. But the intuition is that we do not: we resist the idea that a genuine action-explanation is before us, though we none- theless feel inclined to concede that E' is in some way explanatory of X's having raised the vapor pressure to Pa.The explanation of this awkwardness is surely as follows. When the original explanan- dum, "X brought the water to the boil," is violated by the substi- tution of the relevant identity, and the identity statement is added to the explanans E, a D-N explanatory relation is in fact pre- served,ls and this is why we do have an explanation of X's having raised the vapor pressure to Pa, in a non-full-blooded sense of "X raised the vapor pressure to Pa." The "reasonable-in-the-light-of" relation between explanandum and explanans is not preserved, however,1s and this is why we refuse to countenance that (sound) D-N argument as a genuine action-explanation, as an explanation of a full-blooded action.

So far the discussion has been limited to wants and desires, but it is not always the case that in explaining an action one makes explicit reference to a want or desire. One may say, "X A-ed because he wanted % ," but one might also say, "X A-ed with the intention of bringing about % ." Now I should claim that the explanatory force of these two statements is precisely the same, and

l8Adding a contingent identity statement to the premises of a D-Nargument in order to compensate for the corresponding substitution in the conclusion does not, it would seem, generally preserve explanatoriness, but in the present case the relevant identity statement is a nonaccidental universal.

loIn order to preserve it one would also have to add, among other things, "X believed that to bring water to the boil is to raise water's vapor pressure to Po."

ACTION-EXPLANATIONS

indeed that these statements are materially equivalent,"O but it is clear that wanting is not the same as intending, and one might wonder whether and how explanatory statements of this latter kind fit into the scheme of things outlined. The fit seems to be as follows. First, it is clear, I take it, that the explanatory statement "X A-ed with the intention of bringing about % " is true only if (i) Xintended to bring about % by A-ing, and that intention was not conditional on any factors which X took to be unfulfilled, and ( 5 ) X knew how to A, and (6) X was able to A. Secondly, the follow- ing material equivalence holds.

(X)( % ) (A) ([I] & [2] & [3] & [4] if and only if [i] X intends to bring about % by A-ing, and this

intention is not conditional on any factors which X takes to be ~nfulf i l led.)~~

To assert that, at time t, condition (i) was true of X is to assert that, at time t , X's practical reasonings were concluded in favor of bringing about % by A-ing. But one asserts the very same thing when one asserts that, at time t, conditions ( I ) through (4) were true of X. That is, condition (i) and the conjunction of conditions ( I ) to (4) ascribe the very same "conclusion state" to X. It would seem reasonable to conclude, therefore, that the explanatory character of "X A-ed with the intention of bringing about a" differs in no way from that of "X A-ed because he wanted o":

ao Sometimes there will be a social point to denying the former while asserting the latter. Consider the case where the manager opens the vault with the intention of giving the pistol-waving robber access to the money. Did he open it because he wanted to give the man access to the money? In one sense, no; in another, yes, certainly. His desire to give the man access derives only from his desire to stay alive and his convictions about his circumstances, but it is no less a desire for that. The point of denying that he did it because he wanted to give the man access to the money is oily to indicate that said desire was derivative, uncharacteristic, and stands in conflict with others of his strong desires.

Just in passing, we might note that the parallel equivalence holds in the case of simple or non-"end-directed" intentions.

(X)(A) ([i']and [4'] if and only if [it] X intends to A, and this intention is conditional on no factors which

X takes to be unfulfilled.)

(See Lafor conditions [1'] and [47.)

PAUL M. CHURCHLAND

both statements have the same set of correctness conditions- specifically, the set ( I ) to (6).22 And statements such as "X A-ed with the aim (goal, purpose) of bringing about % " would appear to fit the same explanatory mold, if not generally, at least when X is a person and A is an action.

The facts so far appear entirely intelligible on the view that action-explanations are a special instance of the D-.N type. One need not force a D-.N interpretation on action-explanations; they place such an interpretation on themselves. But a nagging doubt may remain, a doubt fostered primarily, perhaps, by the central role that the ccreasonable-in-the-light-of"relation plays even on this D-.N view of action-explanations. In order to dispel this particular doubt, I shall try to illustrate its pointlessness by way of a critical examination of William Dray's theory of "rational explanat i~n."~~

Dray contends that to give an explanation of an action is to outline the agent's wants, beliefs, and so on in such a way that the action in question can be seen as having been a reasonable thing to do from the agent's point of view at the time.

"Understanding is achieved when the historian can see the reasonableness of a man's doing what the agent did, given the beliefs and purposes referred to; his action can then be explained as having been an 'appropriate' one" (p. I 08).

"Whatit [the action explanation] aims to show is that the sort of thing he did made perfectly good sense from his own point of view" (p. I 09).

Dray insists further that the deducibility of the explanandum from empirical laws and premises about the agent's wants and beliefs is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for explanation of action. It is not a necessary condition because deductive subsumption under a law is not the aim of such explana- tions; their aim is that just characterized. (It should be noted that

One could, of course, take a less contentious position here and simply claim that the conditional (X) (If [i] & [5] & [6 ] ,then [7 ] ) is nornic in character independently ofwhatever relations hold or fail to hold between ( i )and the conjunction of ( I ) to (4).

In what follows I shall be concerned with his recent ex~lication and defense of the position in "The Historical Explanation of Action kco on side red," op. cit.

ACTION-EXPLANATIONS

these two aims are certainly not mutually exclusive.) And it is not a sufficient condition because deducibility of the explanandum from such an explanans does not guarantee that the action in question is thereby shown to be appropriate or reasonable from the agent's point of view.24 Dray would therefore deny that (5), (6), and L, are a part of the explanans for "XA-ed," the explanans consisting of clauses ( I ) through (4) being sufficient for the purpose of explaining why X A-ed.

A most appealing objection to the Dravian view is raised by Carl G. H e m ~ e l . ~ ~Hempel attacks the Dravian view head-on, claiming that since a Dravian explanans does not provide a set of conditions sufficient for (our inferring) the occurrence of the relevant explanandurn-event, that "explanans" cannot, for purely logical reasons, explain why the explanandum-event in particular occurred rather than some other event.

In fairness to Dray, however, Hempel is simply begging the question here, however plausible the stubbornness, for Dray would concede, indeed insist, that there is an important sense in which a Dravian explanans fails to explain a person's action, while insisting that there is also a different, but no less important, sense in which it does explain why the agent did what he did: it provides what Dray terms a "rational explanation" of the action.

Just the same, the situation can hardly be regarded as a stalemate when it is plain that the conjunction of ( I ) through (4) acquires explanatory power when and only when conditions (5) and (6) are also true of X. Recall again the original examples used to illustrate conditions (5) and (6). In those cases, cases where (5) or (6) is false, the agent A-ed, in some sense, and conditions ( I ) through (4) are true, but in those cases the con- junction of conditions ( I ) to (4) in no sense explains why X A-ed. Briefly, such cases would appear to provide an indefinitely large class of counterexamples to Dray's view. In the light of

24 This latter claim is quite correct, in that deductive subsumption under just any law is not sufficient: the law must be such as to guarantee that the required "reasonable-in-the-light-of" relation holds between explanandum and explanans. Deducibility from L, and ( I ) through (6),e.g., would be a sufficient condition for explanation, even on Dravian criteria.

"Reasons and Covering Laws in Historical Explanation," in Philosophy and History, ed. by Sidney Hook (New York, I 963).

PAUL M. CHURCHLAND

such cases, Dray faces a serious problem with respect to the correctness conditions on action-explanations. The problem is serious because, although Dray could insist that a Dravian expla- nans is explanatorily adequate for an explanandum-event only if that event is a full-blooded action (conditions [5] and [6] merely being necessary conditions on this latter), the claim that there is an independent kind of explanatory relation operative in the case of action-explanations is and remains devoid of support: we find it plausible to suppose that the alleged Dravian explanatory relation holds in just those cases where it is independently plausible to suppose that the special D-.N relation we have been discussing obtains. All the facts for which Dray's view can account can be accounted for equally well-because they are accounted for in essentially the same way-on the assumption that action-explana- tions are presumptive of L, (or one of its cousins), and they can be accounted for without multiplying the types of explanation supposed to obtain in our conceptual tool shed. These considera- tions take on a further significance when we consider the following. How is it that we are justified in asserting subjunctive conditionals about what someone would do or would have done were he to want (believe, prefer) or had he wanted (believed, preferred) this or that? On Dray's view, apparently, the only justifiable sub- junctive conditionals would be of the sort "If X had wanted @,

and so forth, then it would have been reasonable for him to have A-ed." The claim that our conception of the connection between wants and actions is not a conception of a lawlike connection is belied not only by our explanatory practices, but also by the fact that we do assert subjunctive conditionals of the kind at issue, a custom in which L, also appears to play a poignantly ubiquitous role.

The not inconsiderable plausibility of Dray's account of the logical character of action-explanations derives primarily from the fact that the "reasonable-in-the-light-of' relation required between explanandum and explanans seems quite unique among types of explanans/explanandum pairs. That such an extra-nomic logical relation should be instanced in the case of action-explanations is indeed significant, but not in the way Dray supposes. As the following case will illustrate, such extra-

ACTION-EXPLANATIONS

nomic logical relations between explanans/explanandum pairs are neither unique nor explanatory.

Suppose that, during a period in the distant past, simple office-variety adding machines occurred naturally, perhaps growing on the ground like watermelons, and that their internal mechanisms were of sufficient biological complexity to escape any ready understanding. Suppose further that the people of that time used the following law to explain the behavior of these biological machines.

L,: (M) (x) (y) (z)(If [I] M is in state [x, y], and [ 2 ] M is operated, and [3]M is able to add-out z [=f(x, y)],

then [4]M adds-out z.)

M ranges over these biological machines. Let x, y, and z range over the integers, and let f(x, y) equal x plus y. Barring vitiating factors, M can be put into state (x, y) by pushing the button with x on it, pulling the handle, pushing the button with y on it, and pulling the handle once again. M is operated by pulling the handle twice in succession. "M adds-out z" entails "M types z," but not the reverse, for M is said to add-out z, in the full-blooded sense of that expression, if and only if the event under that description is correctly explainable in terms of L, and the relevant instances of ( I ) through (3). Lastly, a particular adding-out z is computable in the light of state (x, y) if and only if z is equal to x plus y.

Suppose that, perhaps for religious reasons, these prehistoric people kept these "machines" as their constant companions, that being a model for L, was a central part of their conception of such things and, indeed, that L, was so deeply entrenched in their thinking as to be deleted from explicit consideration (as a premise) even in their unvoiced reasonings. Ordinary adding-out explana- tions thus proceed without reference to L, ("Why did it add-out g?" "It was in state [I, 81 when operated"). One can also imagine a philosopher of that society attempting to develop a theory as to the logical character of these adding-out explanations. He might well note that, for any explanation of an adding-out z to be correct, it must be the case that the adding-out z be computable

PAUL M. CHURCHLAND

in the light of the state (x, y) cited in the explanation. He might further decide that conditions (2) and (3) are merely necessary conditions on the propriety of the description "M added-out z," in the full-blooded sense of that expression, and conclude that to explain an adding-out z is to cite a state (x, y), which the machine was in, and in the light of which the adding-out z is computable, dubbing such explanation "computable explanation" and remarking on its uniqueness and independence of mere empirical laws. The philosopher would be quite mistaken, and I cannot see but that Dray has made essentially the same type of mistake.

In concluding this D-f i account of the logical character of action-explanations, I might point out one dimension in which the adding-machine analogy is a highly appropriate one. The important thing about L, is that it presupposes a particular logical theory: that of numbers and the arithmetical relations between them. Some of the states of adding machines are identified by reference to logical entities: numbers. We do not find it odd therefore that certain of the laws describing the operations of these biological adding machines should embody or reflect certain extra-nomic logical relations, relations such as "computable-in- the-light-of."

Similarly, L,, L,, L,, and a large variety of other law sketches appropriate to persons presuppose a logical theory: that of propositions and the logical relations between them. Wants, beliefs, and a variety of other psychological states and episodes are identified by reference to a specific proposition (hence the referential opacity in such contexts). We should not find it odd therefore that certain of the laws describing our operations should embody or reflect certain extra-nomic logical relations, relations such as "reasonable-in-the-light-of." In what else might our status as "rational agents" consist ?

PAULM. CHURCHLAND University of Toronto