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Dualism in Action

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Jennifer Hornsby
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Extract

We know what one dualist account of human action looks like, because Descartes gave us one. I want to explore the extent ot which presnet-day accounts of physical action are vulnerable to the charges that may be made against Descartes's dualist account. I once put forward an account of human action, and I have always maintained that my view about the basic shape of a correct ‘theory of aciton’ can be combined with a thoroughgoing opposition to dualism. But the possibility of the combination has been doubted and it will remain doubtful until we have a better understanding of what makes an account objectionably dualistic. In this paper, I hope to deflect some of the criticims aimed what I shall call my account, and to show that when they are turned onto their proper path their actual target is some physicalist accounts.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 43 , March 1998 , pp. 377 - 401
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1998

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References

1 The account I gave in Actions (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980)Google Scholar has often been accused of Cartesianism: there are more details in section V, and see note 30 infra

2 I speak of ‘my account’ for the sake of having an easy label for what I defend. Despite the label, I do not mean to suggest either that it originates with me, or that it is the whole of an account of anything. O'Shaughnessy, Brian defended something similar in The Will (2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. The details of what I call ‘my account’ are to be understood as those of Actions. (I think that avoiding Cartesianism requires rejection of some of what O'Shaughnessy said in support of his account: see note 23 infra.)

3 The general idea that there is human agency when a person intentionally does something is relatively uncontroversial. It can be sustained by seeing what sort of trio the concepts of belief, desire and intention form, and thus what kind of psychological explanation an action explanation is.

4 Some resist the assumption that an action is ever an event. Resistance may stem from the thought that actions should not be reckoned among ‘mere happenings’. I hope that it will become clear why, on my own view, there could be no reason to treat actions as ‘mere happenings’.

5 See e.g. Davidson, D., ‘Agency’, in Agent, Action and Reason, ed. Binkley, R. et al. (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; repr. In his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 43–61Google Scholar.

6 When actions are defined by reference to a class of physical events, the general idea of human agency is restricted in two different ways. (A) Left out from the account are things that fall into an intuitive category of the mental. Consider mental arithmetic; or consider the view that agency is evinced whenever there is an exercise of practical reason. (B) Left out from the account are things people intentionally do, the doings of which are not events. Consider an occasion on which a intentionally fails to greet b, and on which we might be apt to say that a did nothing, or say that nothing happened. Here a's intentionally not greeting b may be thought not to be an event; and, if it is not, then we have an example of agency - according to the intuitive conception of agency - but we do not have an action - not according to the restrictive conception of actions.

For present purposes, it need not be a question whether restrictions (A) and (B) ought to be lifted by a correct conception of agency, because charges of dualism are faced by accounts of action which impose the restrictions and deal with ‘physical actions’.

7 Throughout, I use ‘physicalism’ as the name of a kind of monism. I might have used the word ‘materialism’, or, introducing another bone of contention, ‘naturalism’, instead.

8 My italics. Descartes actually adds imagining and having sensory perceptions onto this list of attributes characterizing a soul, but these come (by the Sixth Meditation) to be treated in a special category of their own, so that Descartes's account of perception is not straightforwardly dualist. See Cottingham, John, ‘Cartesian Trialism’, Mind XCIV, No. 374 (04 1985), 218–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The question how straightforwardly dualist Descartes's account of action is comes up in Appendix B.

9 I use ‘souls’ throughout to stand for what Descartes called sometimes ‘esprit’ (or ‘mens’), at other times ‘mâme’ (or ‘anima’). We are familiar enough with ‘minds’ used as a faÇon de parler, supposed to make no commitment to non-physical substances, that ‘souls’ serves better to register such commitment.

10 By ‘Cartesianism’, I mean a conception of mind which, for instance, has been to be the butt of many of Wittgenstein's remarks. Assuming that a doctrine of substance dualism of Descartes's kind is to be avoided, I want to encourage the thought that some of its errors may actually attach to a Cartesianism which it brings with it, and which may attach also to other doctrines.

11 The matter is more complicated than this allows, because Descartes, though he thought that individual souls were substances, took individual bodies to be modifications of stuff, not substances proper. (Those who speak of Descartes simply as a mind/matter dualist ignore his different treatments of individuals in the realm of mind and individuals in the realm of matter. And I too ignore them pro hac vice.)

12 I make the assumption here that brains are substances. In the literature on personal identity, one sometimes encounters the claim that persons are brains; those who advance it do not intend to deny that persons are substances (in the relevant sense). Presumably those who say that minds are brains (who are rather more numerous than those who say that persons are brains) do not have their own special understanding of ‘brain’. And we do not need Descartes's demanding notion of a substance to understand substance dualism in the broad sense (or even in the narrow one: see note 11 supra): ‘persisting things’ might serve for ‘substances’ here.

13 The Passions of the Soul, Article 34.

14 This is not a question that Descartes himself ever attempted to answer. But it is plausible that the attractions of a volitionism like Descartes's may have derived from thinking that having a mental cause could serve to distinguish the bodily movements that occur when there is voluntary (or intentional) action from all other bodily movements.

15 Journal of Philosphy 60 (1963)Google Scholar; repr. In his Essays 3–19, and in The Philosophy of Action ed. Mele, A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 27–41.Google Scholar

16 I criticized this view in ‘Agency and Causal Explanation’, in Mental Causation, ed. Heil, J. and Mele, A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)Google Scholar; repr. in The Philosophy of Action, and in my Simple Mindedness: A Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. The criticisms leave intact a broadly causal picture of human action by allowing that one can provide a causal explanation of what an agent does by saying what her reasons for doing it were. (Although this leaves me opposed to the anti-causalists, I object not only to Davidson's version, but also to all of the usual versions, of causalism: see section VI infra.)

17 Although it is still defended: see Michael Morris, in this volume.

18 At least it is natural to suppose (i) that the phrase ‘bodily movements’ subsumes events such as these, and (ii) that these events are not actions (where an action is an event of someone's intentionally doing something). I used to say that ‘bodily movement’ is ambiguous - so that it could mean either (say) the movement of a person's arm or a person's moving her arm (Actions, chapter 1). But I now think that I was over-generous to my opponents when I suggested that their claim that actions are movements relied upon an ambiguity. The verb ‘move’ is ambiguous, of course — between transitive and intransitive occurrences: ‘move’ plays different roles in ‘She moved her arm’ (where it is a transitive verb) and in ‘her arm moved’ (where it is intransitive). But this ambiguity appears not to carry over to the nominal ‘movement’. When a trace of the transitive verb occurs in a description of an event, we have (say) ‘a person's moving her leg’, and it is not evident that the word ‘movement’ can serve for this. If it cannot serve, then it would take a serious argument to show that a hand's going up (which is a bodily movement) is the same event as a person's raising her hand (which is apparently not a movement). Someone equipped with such an argument will say — as Davidson and others do — that actions just are bodily movements. But the arguments seem to me ill-motivated: see section V infra.

19 Since delivering the lecture on which the present paper is based, I have come across Descartes' Dualism, by Baker, Gordon and Morris, Katherine J. (London: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar, in which the authors argue that Descartes did not hold the doctrine (sc. ‘Cartesian Dualism’) which contemporary philosophers attribute to him. If they are right, then we may be less well placed than I suppose we are to base knowledge of a dualist account of action on our understanding of Descartes. I have responded by adding Appendix B.

20 (T) is to be read as a schema: in any instance ‘V’ is to be replaced by a verb, and the tense of the verb at its left-hand-side occurrence is to match the tense introduced into the ‘try to’ that occurs before the verb's infinitive occurrence on the right-hand-side.

‘My account’ actually requires only that whenever there is an action, there is at least one thing that the agent intentionally does which is something she tries to do (at least one substitutend for ‘V’ gives a truth). My ‘quick and simple’ argument (infra) suggests that agents try to do everything they intentionally do; but this fully general claim, which schema (T) catches, actually need not be at issue.

21 An argument would require the distinctness of actions (e.g. her depressing the key marked ‘£’) and bodily movements (e.g. her finger's moving against the key). Cf. note 18 supra.

22 When ‘tryings’ (simply) are spoken of, people conjure up a picture of ‘mere tryings’: they forget the adverbial characters of ‘try to’. (See my ‘Reasons for Trying’, Journal of Philosophical Research 20 (1995), 525–39.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar It is hard to find a natural terminological policy which enables one both to speak generally and to avoid the misleading impression that there might be ‘mere tryings’. The policy I have adopted here where the context allows is to use ‘try-to’ (rather than just ‘try’) for shorthand, and to use ‘try to —’ as a sort of schematic verb: the intention is to keep it in mind that to try is always to try to do something.

23 In volume II of The Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), O'Shaughnessy, Google Scholar announces that a Gricean argument supports the claim about ‘trying to’ which he and I accept. But he proceeds to give (among others) an argument from illusion, whose tenor is certainly Cartesian. Suffice it here to say that I do not think a defence of (T) (still less of the weaker claim which is really at issue: see note 20 supra) need advert to ‘trying to do seeming Û’, or take a view on the ‘epistemological status of bodily tryings’. A properly Gricean argument can certainly be much simpler than O'Shaughnessy's argument from illusion: see note 24 infra.

24 A Gricean argument which I stated in my Actionspp. 34–5 (which is an argument from ignorance, rather than an argument from illusion) also seeks to show that the background facts which conduce to an instance of ‘She V-d intentionally’ suffice for the relevant instance of ‘She tried to V’.

25 Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), pp. 62Google Scholar.

26 Letter to Hyperaspistes, August 1641, at 112 in Descartes' Philosophical Letters, tr. and ed. Kenny, Anthony (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

27 See Williams, Bernard, Descartes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 288–92Google Scholar.

28 To use the terminology of basicness: everything an agent has it in her power to do is either something basic, or requires knowledge of how nonbasic things can be done by doing basic ones. The relevant notion of basicness here is a teleological one: see my Actions, Chapter 6. (I put the matter slightly differently from Williams Descartes, thinking as I do that a teleological notion of basicness is different from a causal one.)

29 In my Actions, I claimed that ‘actions [and thus events of trying-to] occur inside the body’. The claim is misleading at best. But notice now that the idea was never that there is something inside the body to which predications of ‘trying to —’ attach. And see further the end of Appendix A infra.

30 See (i) Duff, R. A., Intention, Agency and Criminal Liability: Philosophy of Action and the Criminal Law (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar; (ii) Brand, Myles, Intending and Acting: Towards a Naturalized Action Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984)Google Scholar, and Moore, Michael, Act and Crime: The Philosophy of Action and its Implications for Criminal Law Intending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; (a) Brand; (b) Bill Brewer, ‘The Integration of Spatial Vision and Action’, in Spatial Representation, ed. Eilan, Naomi, McCarthy, Rosaleen and Brewer, Bill, (Oxford and Cambridge, Ma: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 294–316Google Scholar; (c) Duff, Intention.

31 If there are cases in which a person tries in vain to move a part of her body, then the claim here is not a universal one. For present purposes, it makes no odds whether one accepts that there are such cases: the claim might be that where someone tries to do something and thereby intentionally does something, her trying to do the thing is her doing it. I discuss vain attempts to move the body in Appendix A.

32 Descartes might have said that a volition is part of an action, the other part being a bodily movement. Not talking the explicit event language, Descartes did not in fact address questions about parthood. But some contemporary philosophers are explicit about actions having both mental and physical proper parts, taking this to be a sine qua non of action's psychophysical character.

33 See Davidson, , ‘Agency’ at p. 59Google Scholar in reprinted version; and Moore, , Act and Crime, at p. 83Google Scholar, who announces that ‘actions are no more than bodily movements’ is a ‘reductive’ thesis.

34 Descartes's belief in souls is normally thought of as arrived as through the introspective route he took in the Meditations. But part of his reason for attaching mental properties to a soul was a difficulty he thought he saw about attaching them to a substance whose principles of operation are purely mechanistic. See ‘Descartes, Rorty and the Mind-Body Fiction’, repr. In Simple Mindedness, pp. 24–41.

35 There are plenty of substitutes for ‘something’ in ‘the agent's trying to do something’, plenty of verbs besides ‘move the body’ which can replace ‘V’ in (T); and (T) introduces the agent's trying to do any of the things which she does intentionally.

36 I say ‘nearly everyone’ to allow for the anti-causalists (see section II supra). The treatment of mental causation is a question for all causalists. It might seem that there is a special question for Descartes and me, because we accept (what many don't) that the agent's body is a locus of ‘mental causation’. (Many think that one has to look to actions' antecedents — to what occurs before anything bodily - in order to find anything which is both psychologically describable and causally operative.) Still, we saw in section III that even someone who rejects my general claims about action may accept that there are occasions when a person moves her body therein trying to do something. So perhaps nearly everyone accepts that the agent's body is sometimes a locus of mental causation. That would ensure that there is in fact no special question for Descartes and me. But however this may be, nearly everyone allows that there is ‘mental causation’.

37 And it has been the topic of a massive literature: see, e.g., the papers in Mental Causation, ed. Heil and Mele. I attach square quotes to ‘mental causation’, being reluctant to think of the causal dependencies which correspond to persons' causal complexity as marking out any kind of causation: see note 40 infra.

38 Cf. McDowell, John, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), at p. 90Google Scholar. Put in the terms that McDowell takes from Sellars, what the present paper argues is that human physical action is situated in the space of reasons, where the space of reasons is to be contrasted not with the space of causes but with nomological space (and where the space of reasons, evidently, is not the space just of cognition).

39 For reasons to reject the typical conceptualization, see Helen Steward's arguments against what she calls the network model of causation in her Ontology of Mind: Events, States and Processes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

40 In ‘The Mental Causation Debate,’ Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 69 (1995), 211–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Tim Crane argues that the dominant contemporary versions of physicalism implicitly reject the assumption of ‘homogeneity’ — the assumption ‘that mental and physical causation are the same kind of relation’. It seems then that I am on the side of contemporary physicalists in my treatment of mental causation. Well, I am more than happy to acknowledge Crane's point that there is a homogeneity assumption which provokes contemporary physicalist treatments of mental causation but which they find themselves forced to abandon. (I take their abandonment of the assumption to be symptomatic of a problem which is inherent in the orthodoxy and which I have tried to expose here.) But it would be an oversimplification of my own view to say that mental and physical causation are different kinds of relation. It is rather that we have to stop thinking that all causation can be understood by reference to the going model of ‘physical causation’ (cf. Steward, , Ontology, and my ‘Causation in Intuitive Physics and in Commonsense Psychology’, in Simple Mindedness, pp. 185–94)Google Scholar; and that we have to allow for the species of intelligibility that is peculiar to rational sentient beings.

I should note that my arguments here - about treating events of trying-to as brain events - are directly addressed to a version of physicalism which does not flout the homogeneity assumption as Crane sets things up. But when I say that it is part of the orthodoxy that one must be able to see the mental's causal operation as an example of the world's working causally in such a way as to reflect its law-like workings, I intend to speak to other versions of physicalism, including what Crane calls ‘the constitution view’.

I thank Paul Boghossian, David Papineau, Scott Sturgeon, and (especially) Tim Crane (who prompted me to re-read his ‘Mental Causation Debate’) for questions asked after the lecture on which this paper is based.

41 Brewer, ‘Integration’, p. 306.

42 ‘Postscript’ to ‘Bodily Movements, Actions and Epistemology’, in Simple Mindedness.

43 In Descartes' Dualism.