Objections to Davidson’s Theory of Agency and Actions

Open Journal of Social Sciences 11:355-362 (2023)
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Abstract

Davidson’s theory of agency aims to solve the dilemma that the same action can be both intentional and not intentional. He explains primitive actions using primarily bodily movements and argues that event-causality can be described through the “accordion effect”, but not agent-causality. And Davidson uses reasons as causes to explain the actions and responds to five objections. In this paper, I critique Davidson’s argument, pointing out that he ignores certain factors in the belief-desire model, such as emotions. And his sentence holism has a problem because individual words that express complete thoughts can explain actions in language games. As a result, Davidson’s criticism of Wittgenstein is not reasonable.

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Yu Zhang
Jilin University

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