Chapter 8 - One Fell Swoop: Small Red Book Historicism Before and After Davidson

Summary

Prologue

Donald Davidson begins his landmark paper ‘Action, Reasons and Causes’ by contrasting his so-called causalist account of reason-giving explanations of action with the views of a large number of then-prominent philosophers, all of whom were writing from within a loosely Wittgensteinian tradition. These are dismissed in one fell swoop:

In this paper I want to defend the ancient – and commonsense – position that rationalization is a species of causal explanation. The defence no doubt requires some redeployment, but it does not seem necessary to abandon the position, as has been urged by many recent writers [fn: Some examples: Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action, H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honoré, Causation in the Law, William Dray, Laws and Explanation in History, and most of the books in the series edited by R. F. Holland, Studies in Philosophical Psychology, including Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will, and A. I. Melden, Free Action]. (Davidson 1963, 3)

In a later essay, Davidson acknowledges Carl Hempel's deep influence on his views while re-affirming the contrast to the volumes in Holland's series:

In December of 1961 Hempel gave the presidential address at the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. The title was ‘Rational Action’. In that address, Hempel argued that explanation of intentional action by appeal to the agent's reasons does not differ in its general logical character from explanation generally; in taking this position, he was swimming against a very strong neo-Wittgensteinian current of small red books. (Davidson 1976, 26)

The contrast is not imaginary, although we shall come to see in due course that it is subtler than Davidson lets on. As we shall see, numerous books in Holland's series defend the view that the relation between an agent's reason(s) and her action(s) should be understood not causally but logically, normatively, conceptually and/or hermeneutically. In this they are united by various forms of what might reasonably be termed anti-scientism. The books do not have a clearly articulated and specific target here – certainly no definition of scientism is ever provided – but there is a general suspicion of any philosophy that attempts to answer questions relating to human minds and actions by appeal to models stemming from natural science, such as physical mechanisms.