REFLECTION:

I did not do anything on the 28th except drive home. I am relatively satisfied on what I have done these past few days though here is some of the art I made on the 29th and then some of the work I did for my essay.

and then here is my essay beginnings.

I: Looking at temporal causation in Davidson’s Actions, Reasons, and Causes. To begin, maybe something to look at when exploring action and agency is to examine what exactly action is. Davidson argues in ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ “that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation.” This includes the pro-attitude, the inclination of an action of some type, and the belief that said action is of that certain type. Our rationalization, taken as our citation of reasoning to mental states, is then causal. This is different from the normative, what is “right or wrong”, in that it emphasizes the pro-attitude, and uses rationality to describe the causal connection between internal thought and action. With this, emphasizing the human agent in that Davidson’s framework seems to be designed for accounting for human behavior. This framework helps illustrate what makes something an action rather than just an event. By examining that in order for something to be an action, it has to be caused by some kind of “reason”, a pro-attitude, and a belief pair.

(p1: Look at Davidson’s arguments briefly.)

This puts pressure on the question “what makes something a genuine agent as opposed to something which just produces outputs.” Davidson seems to be proposing in this that the agent is a distinct, unified, coherent self. Speaking strictly of human behavior here, as this is what Davidson’s framework seems to focus on, it seems to me that much of human interaction is based on compulsion and, to some extent, normative sorts of activities. However, it does make sense to think of action causally, in that it is intuitive to believe that not all events are actions.

These compulsions seem initially to fall under the point Davidson makes on how reasons do not always need to be based in normative-reason to be the belief that induces a pro-attitude surrounding some action’s rationality. One of the examples used here is the example that “claustrophobia gives a man’s reason for leaving a cocktail party.” It is assumed here that the reason comes from a single unified agent, in that the claustrophobia is integrated entirely with the reasoning system of the man. An agent does not seem in this sense to just be putting out outputs in the way that a computer might, in that there is a belief behind every action. There is not just some system, loosely connected to everything, which derives outputs from inputs It might be useful to think of citing mental states as a tool for determining what might be an action in human behavior, but it does not seem to cover how other sorts of beings we consider agents act.

Among human behaviors, Davidson’s framework does not seem to take into account the sorts of human behaviors associated with executive dysfunction. Where someone might have a disconnect between the causal thread of pro-attitude and belief, in that someone could have authority over their reasoning, but not have the power to govern their actions. You would have the reasons that might meet Davidson’s criteria, but not the initiation of action.

With that, it might be reasonable to look at the chronological ordering of Davidson’s causal explanations in the context of how an action is acted. As this would be a necessary context for the actual severing from Davidson’s framework, in an example of executive dysfunction. There is the question, if the action comes from reasons, then is it first the action or first the reasons? This could be a bit of a misconception of necessity, though. Davidson does not seem to give a clear answer to the idea of “chronological causation” if one thing must be after another. Causation in reasoning and action, to Davidson, seems to be constituted by both pro-attitude and belief simultaneously.

If we look at it this way, Davidson does not offer up much in how reasons would initiate action as the mental causation, belief, and pro-attitude seem to be chronologically unified in causation. As Davidson’s framework does not incorporate temporality outright, it does not answer the question of initiating action and seems, in some ways, by doing this, to neglect the central question as to what makes something a genuine action.

here is a link to the webshrine