Cartwright attempts to argue from an analysis of the composition of forces, and more generally the composition of laws, to the conclusion that laws must be regarded as false. A response to Cartwright is developed which contends that properly understood composition poses no threat to the truth of laws, even though agreeing with Cartwright that laws do not satisfy the "facticity" requirement. My analysis draws especially on the work of Creary, Bhaskar, Mill, and points towards a general rejection of Cartwright's (...) view that laws, especially fundamental laws, should be seen as false. (shrink)

Several disputes about the nature of experience operate under the assumption that experiences have parts, including temporal parts. There's the widely held view, when it comes to temporal experiences, that we should follow James' exhortation that such experiences aren't mere successions of their temporal parts, but something more. And there's the question of whether it is the parts of experiences which determine whole experiences and the properties they have, or whether the determination goes instead from the whole to the parts, (...) as holists have it. But what are parts, or temporal parts, of experiences exactly—what does it mean to say that an experience is “part” of another? Are the participants in those disputes talking about the same thing—is there a univocal notion of “experiential part” available? Are there different kinds of experiential parts? And if there are, is there a systematic way of carving them out? More importantly, how should we conceive of the temporal parts of experiences, and how can we establish that experiences really do have temporal parts, against those who reject the notion? (shrink)

We can cause windows to break and we can break windows; we can cause villages to flood and we can flood villages; and we can cause chocolate to melt and we can melt chocolate. Each time these can come apart: if, for example, A merely instructs B to break the window, then A causes the window to break without breaking it herself. Each instance of A breaking/flooding/melting/burning/killing/etc. something, is an instance of what I call making. I argue that making is (...) an independent, theoretically important notion—akin but irreducible to causing—and metaphysicians should pay attention to it. (shrink)

When are two tokens of a name tokens of the same name? According to this paper, the answer is a matter of the historical connections between the tokens. For each name, there is a unique originating event, and subsequent tokens are tokens of that name only if they derive in an appropriate way from that originating event. The conditions for a token being a token of a given name are distinct from the conditions for preservation of the reference of a (...) name. Hence a name may change its reference. Defending the theory requires considerations about the identity of acts, and about empty names and disagreement. The upshot is a causal theory of the identity of names, but not what would normally be counted as a causal theory of the reference of names. Although reference is often transmitted causally, what determines semantic reference is conventionalized speaker-reference. (shrink)

Davidsonian analyses of action reports like ‘Alvin chased Theodore around a tree’ are often viewed as supporting the hypothesis that sentences of a human language H have truth conditions that can be specified by a Tarski-style theory of truth for H. But in my view, simple cases of adverbial modification add to the reasons for rejecting this hypothesis, even though Davidson rightly diagnosed many implications involving adverbs as cases of conjunct-reduction in the scope of an existential quantifier. I think the (...) puzzles in this vicinity reflect “framing effects,” which reveal the implausibility of certain assumptions about how linguistic meaning is related to truth and logical form. We need to replace these assumptions with alternatives, instead of positing implausible values of event-variables or implausible relativizations of truth to linguistic descriptions of actual events. (shrink)

Branching theories are popular frameworks for modeling objective indeterminism in the form of a future of open possibilities. In such theories, the notion of a history plays a crucial role: it is both a basic ingredient in the axiomatic definition of the framework, and it is used as a parameter of truth in semantics for languages with a future tense. Furthermore, histories—complete possible courses of events—ground the notion of modal consistency: a set of events is modally consistent iff there is (...) a history containing that set. We will explain these roles of histories and highlight some critical aspects having to do with the fact that histories are global and, in a relevant sense, “big” objects. The notion of modal consistency, on the other hand, has both local and global aspects. We ask in how far a local notion of modal consistency can serve as an alternative to the common uses of histories, and work out two recent approaches to alternatives to histories. Combining these approaches, we develop a novel semantics for branching time. (shrink)

The paper offers a critical examination of Jennifer Hornsby's view that actions are internal to the body. It focuses on three of Hornsby's central claims: (P) many actions are bodily movements (in a special sense of the word “movement”) (Q) all actions are tryings; and (R) all actions occur inside the body. It is argued, contra Hornsby, that we may accept (P) and (Q) without accepting also the implausible (R). Two arguments are first offered in favour of the thesis (Contrary-R): (...) that no actions occur inside the body. Three of Hornsby's arguments in favour of R are then examined. It is argued that we need to make a distinction between the causes and the causings of bodily movements (in the ordinary sense of the word “movement”) and that actions ought to be identified with the latter rather than the former. This distinction is then used to show how Hornsby's arguments for (R) may be resisted. (shrink)

A structure is described that can serve as a foundation for a semantics for a modal agentive construction such as sees to it that Q ([ stit: Q]). The primitives are Tree,,Instant, Agent, choice. Eleven simple postulates governing this structure are set forth and motivated. Tree and encode a picture of branching time consisting of moments gathered into maximal chains called histories. Instant imposes a time-like ordering. Agent consists of agents, and choice assigns to each agent and each moment in (...) Tree a set of possible choices, where each possible choice is a set of histories. All of these ingredients are referred to in the semantics suggested for [ stit: Q]. The most complex part of the discussion is the motivation for the definition of what it means for a typically non-terminating chain of moments jointly to witness the truth of [ stit: Q] at a moment.The paper begins with an informal account of the Refref conjecture, which says that the only way to refrain from refraining from seeing to something is to see to it. The paper ends with a consideration of an argument of Prior's that in a certain sense contemplation and action are inconsistent. (shrink)

In this paper, the ontological, terminological, epistemological, and ethical aspects of omission are considered in a coherent and balanced framework, based on the idea that there are omissions which are actions and omissions which are non-actions. In particular, we suggest that the approach to causation which best deals with omission is Mackie's INUS conditional proposal. We argue that omissions are determined partly by the ontological conditional structure of reality, and partly by the interests, beliefs, and values of observers. The final (...) upshot is that moral judgments involved in cases of omissions cannot be grounded on, but are the ground for judgments about what INUS conditions count as omissions. (shrink)

The philosophical problem of mental causation concerns a clash between commonsense and scientific views about the causation of human behaviour. On the one hand, commonsense suggests that our actions are caused by our mental states—our thoughts, intentions, beliefs and so on. On the other hand, neuroscience assumes that all bodily movements are caused by neurochemical events. It is implausible to suppose that our actions are causally overdetermined in the same way that the ringing of a bell may be overdetermined by (...) two hammers striking it at the same time. So how are we to reconcile these two views about the causal origins of human behaviour? One philosophical doctrine effects a nice reconciliation. Neuralism, or the token-identity theory, states that every particular mental event is a neurophysiological event and that every action is a physically specifiable bodily movement. If these identities hold, there is no problem of causal overdetermination: the apparently different causal pathways to the behaviour are actually one and the same pathway viewed from different perspectives. This attractively simple view is enjoying a recent revival in fortunes. (shrink)

The view that actions are bodily movements, also known as corporealism, was much discussed in the latter half of the twentieth century, but now commands fewer adherents. The present paper argues th...

There has been considerable debate regarding the relative merits of two theses about moral obligation known as actualism and possibilism. Both theses seek to give expression to the general idea that one ought to do the best one can. According to actualism, one’s obligations turn on what would happen if one chose some course of action, whereas, according to possibilism, they turn on what could happen if one chose some course of action. There are two strands to the debate: the (...) substantive verdicts that the two theses render in particular cases, and the accounts that they yield of the conceptual structure of moral obligation. Possibilism is conceptually appealing, whereas actualism is not, but the latter may seem to render superior substantive verdicts. In this paper, it is argued that, by turning from the objectivist’s emphasis on what is actually best to the prospectivist’s emphasis on what one’s evidence indicates is best, possibilists can provide an account of moral obligation that is both conceptually and substantively attractive. (shrink)

In this article, I challenge the dominant view of the importance of the debate over action-individuation. On the dominant view, it is held that the conclusions we reach about action-individuation make little or no difference for other debates in the philosophy of action, much less in other areas of philosophy. As a means of showing that the dominant view is mistaken, I consider the implications of accepting a given theory of action-individuation for thinking about doxastic agency. In particular, I am (...) interested in the implications for thinking about the variety of evaluative control we can exercise over the formation of our doxastic attitudes. I show that our assumptions about how to individuate actions matters for how we think about doxastic agency and, hence, the conclusions we reach about action-individuation are of greater significance than some have thought. (shrink)

We propose a theory of events and causes against the background of branching time. Notions discussed include possibility based on reality, transitions, events, determinacy, contingency, causes and effects. The main idea in defining causal relations is to introduce a certain preconditioning circumstance under which one event follows another. We also briefly compare this theory with some other theories.

The widely agreed view that actions are events faces the problem of how to describe the “branches” in so-called action trees, i.e. actions which are done by doing other actions. Moreover, the view is also inconsistent with the existence of two familiar species of agency: omitting something and letting things happen. In this article, an alternative conception of action is proposed which takes letting happen as the paradigm of agency. Agency should be construed as an explanatory relation between agents and (...) things happening in the world. This relational view of agency can accommodate for all kinds of agency: doing, letting happen, omitting, prohibiting. And it also provides a satisfactory account of the ontological basis of action trees. We should at first say that to do something is to originate or to bring into existence, i.e., really, to cause, some not yet existing state either of ourselves or of someone else, or, again, of some body. (shrink)

Popper’s introduction of ‘‘propensity’’ was intended to provide a solid conceptual foundation for objective single-case probabilities. By considering the partly opposed contributions of Humphreys and Miller and Salmon, it is argued that when properly understood, propensities can in fact be understood as objective single-case causal probabilities of transitions between concrete events. The chief claim is that propensities are well-explicated by describing how they fit into the existing formal theory of branching space-times, which is simultaneously indeterministic and causal. Several problematic examples, (...) some commonsense and some quantum-mechanical, are used to make clear the advantages of invoking branching space-times theory in coming to understand propensities. (shrink)

Two questions guide this article. First, according to Fischer and Ravizza (jointly and otherwise), what epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for performing an action A are not also requirements for freely performing A? Second, how much progress have they made on this front? The article's main moral is for philosophers who believe that there are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing that are not requirements for freely A-ing because they assume that Fischer (on his own or otherwise) (...) has shown that this is so. In showing that this assumption is false, I reopen an important question for these philosophers: How are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing related to requirements for freely A-ing? This is an interesting question in its own right, of course. (shrink)

The view that to act is to cause change and that to be an agent is to be the causer of an action’s result has gained traction in the past twenty years or so. This view seems to have two significant corollaries. First, there is no distinction between doing an action and causing its result. Second, any two actions that have the same result will turn out to be identical. Ruben (2018) has recently used the first corollary to challenge the (...) view, and the second corollary raises further problems for the view. This article aims to refine this view and defend it against the challenges that arise out of its two corollaries. It is argued that being the cause of an action’s result is not the same as being its causer and that doing an action is not just causing its result but causing it in a specific way. (shrink)

This paper is about what I call the Question of Iterated Causation (QIC): for any instance of causation in which c1…ck cause effect e, what are the causes of c1…ck’s causing of e? In short: what causes instances of causation or, as I will refer to these instances, the “causal goings‐on”? A natural response (which I call “dismissivism”) is that this is a bad question because causal goings‐on aren’t apt to be caused. After rebutting several versions of dismissivism, I consider (...) the view that QIC, though not illegitimate, is easy to answer: the causal goings‐on are apt to be caused but are plainly uncaused (“brutism”). However, I will argue that brutism too has a serious problem: namely, it leads to a highly implausible kind of armchair indeterminism. Next I consider some substantive candidate answers to QIC, none of which, I argue, is particularly promising. The paper’s final conclusion is twofold: QIC is at least as difficult as the more well‐known Question of Iterated Grounding; moreover, the largely overlooked regress problem that it raises gives us at least some defeasible reason to avoid causation in theory‐building. (shrink)

In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings (...) of explanatory pluralism both within philosophy of science and psychiatry – namely moderate/temporary pluralism, anything goes pluralism, isolationist pluralism, integrative pluralism and interactive pluralism. Next, I discuss the pros and cons of these different understandings of explanatory pluralism. Finally, I raise the question of how to implement or operationalize explanatory pluralism in scientific practice; how to structure the “genuine dialogue” or shape “the pluralistic attitude” Campaner is referring to. As tentative answers, I explore a question-based framework for explanatory pluralism as well as social-epistemological procedures for interaction among competing approaches and explanations. (shrink)

This article reviews some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what agents do intentionally and what they intend in various stories and explores its bearing on the philosophical project of providing a conceptual analysis of intentional action. The article is a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a variety of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and vice versa. Topics examined include double effect; the influence of moral considerations on judgments about what (...) is done intentionally and about what is intended; the influence of considerations of luck, skill, and causal deviance on judgments about what agents do intentionally; what interesting properties all cases of intentional action might share; and the debate between proponents of, respectively, "the Simple View" of the connection between intentional action and intention and "the Single Phenomenon View" of that connection. A substantial body of literature is devoted to the project of analyzing intentional action [1] . In this article, I explore the bearing on that project of some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what is done intentionally and about what is intended. This article may reasonably be regarded as a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a range of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and, likewise, of the potential bearing of attempted philosophical analyses of folk concepts on empirical studies of those concepts. (shrink)

Just as we may ask whether, and under what conditions, a collection of objects composes a single object, we may ask whether, and under what conditions, a collection of actions composes a single action. In the material objects literature, this question is known as the "special composition question," and I take it that there is a similar question to be asked of collections of actions. I will call that question the "special composition question in action," and argue that the correct (...) answer to this question depends on a particular kind of consequence produced by the individual constituent actions. (shrink)

There are intentional actions and unintentional actions. Do we ever perform actions that are neither intentional nor unintentional? Some philosophers have answered "yes" (Mele 1992; Mele and Moser 1994; Mele and Sverdlik 1996; Lowe 1978; Wasserman, forthcoming). That is, they have claimed that there is a middle ground between intentional and unintentional human actions.1 Motivation for this claim is generated by attention to a variety of issues, including two that are of special interest to experimental philosophers of action: the status (...) of side-effect actions, and the status of actions that are instances of luckily succeeding in doing something one is trying to do. This article explores the idea that there is a middle ground between intentional and unintentional human actions, paying special attention to the two issues just identified. The exploration is partly theoretical and partly empirical. Section 2 reports the results of two new studies designed to yield evidence about whether and to what extent nonspecialists recognize this middle ground. (shrink)

This paper examines three views of what an omission or an instance of refraining is. The view advanced is that in many cases, an omission is simply an absence of an action of some type. However, generally one’s not doing a certain thing counts as an omission only if there is some norm, standard, or ideal that calls for one’s doing that thing.

Many issues at the heart of the philosophy of action and of philosophical work on free will are framed partly in terms of causation. The leading approach to understanding both the nature of action and the explanation or production of actions emphasizes causation. What may be termed standardcausalism is the conjunction of the following two theses: firstly, an event's being an action depends on how it was caused; and secondly, proper explanations of actions are causal explanations. Important questions debated in (...) the literature on free will include: is an action's being deterministically caused incompatible with its being freely performed? Are actions free only if they are indeterministically caused? Does the indeterministic causation of an action preclude its being freely performed? Does free action require agent causation? This article concentrates on issues about action and free will that centrally involve causation. (shrink)

JUDITH THOMSON, IN "ACTS AND OTHER EVENTS", PURPORTS TO PROVIDE A COUNTER-EXAMPLE TO DONALD DAVIDSON'S CAUSAL CRITERION OF EVENT IDENTITY. IT IS SHOWN THAT ONCE A CERTAIN ASSUMPTION MADE BY THOMSON IS REPLACED BY A MORE PLAUSIBLE VARIANT, HER EXAMPLE IS NO LONGER A COUNTER-EXAMPLE TO DAVIDSON'S CRITERION.