Abstract
Philosophical interest in the nature of action has perhaps never been greater than in the past 60 years. It is no exaggeration to say that more has been written on the topic during this period than at any other time in the history of the discipline. Unlike many philosophical debates that often seem parochial even by the standards of the academy, action theory intersects with almost every major philosophical genre from metaphysics to philosophy of language to ethics, and reaches across disciplinary boundaries to include the social sciences and, increasingly, cognitive science. The broad reach of this topic means that a wide range of competing positions exists though only a few of these dominate the conceptual landscape. James Swindal’s Action and Existence argues that several dominant theories of action fail to give a convincing account of human agency and as a consequence fail to explain how individual responsibility connects to action. According to the book, contemporary cognitive approaches to intentional action often characterize the rationality of actions in terms of their public intelligibility. This tends to eliminate or downplay the conditioning role of choice in the causal explanation of actions. Assignments of personal responsibility and agency, however, depend upon understanding precisely how the agent’s decision to act connects to the action she or he ultimately performs. The theoretical analysis of action presented in the book is motivated by the need to provide a more robust account of agency, which, the book argues, must include an account of agent causation. A sensible approach to understanding this short but dense book is to examine its argument in two steps: beginning with the critical analysis first and taking up the constructive argument of the book second.
The book claims that due to insufficient analysis of the deliberative process that precedes action as it appears from the first-person perspective, the theories of action developed in the works of Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas fail to generate coherent or convincing theories of agency. According to Swindal, a theory of agency must provide adequate grounds for explaining personal responsibility. This requires an explication of the link between the deliberative processes of an agent and the subsequent action. He accuses both Habermas and Davidson of failing to give a coherent account of this link. While each succeeds in providing a partial description of the intentional features of action, neither provides a complete account of the constitutive elements of action because both are insufficiently attentive to the conditioning role of an individual’s deliberation prior to acting.
The analysis of Davidson’s reasons-as-causes approach is certainly warranted given its prominence in the philosophical literature, but although this is not clearly articulated in the book, it seems that the book’s more pressing goal is to develop a stable foundation for the Habermasian project of critical social theory. 1 One can thus place the book within a long-running debate in Habermas scholarship about the adequacy of the formal pragmatic project that provides conceptual justification for the concept of communicative action. 2 The book’s analysis of Davidson should therefore be seen as an attempt to show that the standard theory of action derived from his work 3 is subject to objections similar to those it finds in its analysis of Habermas’ theory. Thus, by extension, reasons–causal approaches cannot provide the conceptual resources to shore up the particular shortcomings of Habermas’ formal pragmatic enterprise revealed in Swindal’s analysis. The examination of Habermas’ theory of action in this book contains several distinct, but nonetheless related, criticisms. In the following, only two will be examined, since this provides the clearest bridge between the critical and constructive parts of the book.
The explanation of an individual’s intention to act can in most cases be reduced to an agent’s deeper motive, according to Habermas. These motives (needs and wants) ‘lie deeper than intentions or decisions’ and dispose us to ‘choose goals of action’ while also providing a horizon of possible goals through volitional (desire) and perceptual (emotional) elements that interpret underlying needs. 4 These are the grounds on which an agent takes a stance toward reality. But Habermas holds that these two faces of motives have no explanatory power if they themselves cannot be plausibly interpreted in light of publicly accessible values and norms. 5 In order to explain an action, or in other words make it intelligible, it is necessary to show how it is plausible that the intention with which it is carried out represents values accepted by others. On Habermas’ account then, insofar as an action is intelligible, the intention by which it is explained must be accessible to others though they may not necessarily accept it as a motivating reason themselves. Swindal points out, however, that this has the consequence of completely occluding the individual’s subjective representation of the action from analysis. This is problematic for the same reason that he later finds Davidson’s definition of action as intentional under some description problematic. Both tend to discount the causal role that the agent’s representation of the action to himself or herself plays in bringing about an action. But it seems reasonable to hold that assigning responsibility to an agent ought to take her or his deliberations into account, if only to give sense to the agent’s ability to correct descriptions of the action she or he takes to be false or misleading.
The causal relation between intentions and action is problematic in Habermas’ theory since he insists on strict conceptual distinction between an action and the bodily movements that occur simultaneously. The justification for this particular distinction is twofold. First, bodily movements by themselves are not recognizable as intentional actions. Only when a movement itself is described in light of some intention does a bodily movement become connected to an action. But since a description of an agent’s intention never includes the bodily movements as such (at least in non-trivial cases), 6 he holds that intentional actions are logically distinct from bodily movements. Second, observed movements only yield intentional descriptions that are provisional and hypothetical until the intentions of the agent are made transparent in his or her speech acts. 7 Speech acts are the only intentional actions for which intentions can be definitively determined, since in grasping their meaning, one consequently knows the intention with which they are done. At the risk of rushing over the details of the argument somewhat, one could say that the combination of (1) the analytic separation of action and bodily movement and (2) the claim that speech acts are the paradigmatic actions tends to efface the causal consequences of actions from the explanation of an action. The book argues that compartmentalizing the causal and rational levels of explanation in this way further obscures the link between the rational elements of intentional actions and the objective causal consequences of those actions. 8
The critique of Davidson’s views provides an insightful analysis of his departure from the prevailing functionalist and Wittgensteinian accounts of action in the essay ‘Reasons as Causes’, and the subsequent development of his theory of action, collected in the book Essays on Actions and Events (2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). Swindal argues, however, that Davidson’s conceptual strategy of using semantic criteria both to define intentional actions as such, and also to explain the relation between agent and action, is deficient for the following reasons. Davidson claims that in normal cases of attributing the causality of an event to an agent, a fully satisfactory account of this causality often refers to the causality of another event, namely, some other act that the agent does, rather than to any unique causal power of the agent. Since according to Davidson, attributions of agency apply in the first case to events of bodily movement and a causal explanation of these events can be given in intentional terms without reference to an agent cause, he holds that there is no need to develop a further account of agency. Attributions of agency on this account seem to supervene upon the logically prior intentional description of action events. This keeps action explanation safely within a naturalistic ontology of events. All that is required, on this account, for attributing agency to an individual is that her or his bodily movements be intentional under some description. But, Swindal points out, how can one be sure that the description under which the action is intentional from the observer’s perspective is in fact the same description under which the agent herself or himself recognizes the action? Without further examining the relation between the agent’s intentional actions and her or his representation of the causal consequences of alternative primitive actions, Davidson’s theory underdetermines the criteria for attributing actions to an agent. The critique suggests that an account of agency that does not clarify in what respect an agent is uniquely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions is no account of agency at all.
The critical examinations of Habermas’ and Davidson’s views in this book express an underlying skepticism that explaining an action is reducible to describing the generalizable public features of the action. The book seeks to undermine the inference that lies behind such an approach, namely from the fact that in order to explain an action it must be publicly intelligible, to the claim that this public intelligibility provides the constitutive criteria for every action. As Swindal succinctly puts it, ‘many behaviors we call actions are neither generalizable nor social’. 9 The strategy of his analysis is to admit that the publicly intelligible features of actions may clarify the intentional aspects of actions, while refusing to grant that these same features are sufficient to explain why the agent does the particular action she or he does. Another way of stating the problem might be as follows: if the prevailing normative and reasons–causal approaches fail adequately to explicate the connection between an agent’s intentions and the material constraints upon that agent’s actions, then they also fail to explain why an agent is personally responsible for his or her actions.
Although the book could be clearer on this point, the common fault it attributes to both accounts is a bias toward cognitive conditions of rational action, at the expense of the non-inferential constraints which precede and condition the cognitive elements of action, such as ‘the agent’s desires, other persons’ constraints, and the history of both of these’. 10 This is problematic, according to Swindal, insofar as the particular inferences that an agent makes in deliberating about an action cannot be specified in detail without reference both to cognitive and to material constraints on action. 11 Habermas and Davidson examine only the former. In order to make good this deficit, the constructive argument attempts to articulate a theory of action in which the inferential and non-inferential constraints on action are more clearly related in the deliberative process of the agent. The interplay of these two elements from the first-person perspective of an individual’s deliberative process provides the basis for the book’s argument for the necessity of agent causality.
Swindal holds that a full description of the inferences an agent makes in her or his deliberative process prior to acting reveals a complex set of modal references. The agent’s representation of an action as a means must refer to totalities of states of affairs that are possible but not actual, in addition to the totality of presently actual states of affairs. Further, the agent must be able to infer that only his or her action will make some possible state of affairs actual. But this results in a modal incompatibility between representing the same action as part of a possible, but not yet actual, totality of states of affairs, and the representation of the action as conditioned by and thus a part of the totality of presently existing states of affairs. The novel element of his approach is to show that this modal ‘antinomy’ applies to fully normative accounts of action, such as that found in Habermas. Presuming that an action's intelligibility derives from the fact that it follows a particular rule or norm, it follows that the action is intelligible to the agent prior to the act, only if the agent views that action as following some norm. But, according to Swindal, the agent would have to represent the action as an instance of a norm that ‘presently is not actually followed’, while also representing the action in terms of the totality of material conditions that presently obtain. 12 Thus, in order for an agent to form a rational intention based on these inferences, two modally incompatible representations of the action must be ‘resolved’, i.e. one (possible) totality in which the norm is followed, and another (actual) totality in which the norm is not followed. Summarizing the argument perhaps too much, this ‘antinomy can be resolved only by a non-rule-derived choice to establish or maintain a contingent but nonetheless normative state of affairs for the agent’. 13
The account of agent causation that Swindal develops as a resolution to this antinomy is ambitious. It urges semantic and pragmatic approaches to action theory to address the kind of metaphysical questions about intentional action that these approaches consciously seek to minimize or avoid altogether. At the same time, it remains unwilling to reject the basic standpoint of both approaches, especially the Habermasian attempt to ground a normative theory of society in the universal presuppositions of language use. Whether this particular argument establishes the positive point, I leave to the reader. However, it seems to me that anyone committed to the basic premises of either approach should take seriously the criticisms of both Habermas and Davidson offered in this book.
If there is one criticism of the book, it is that it attempts to do too much at times. The author is compelled, largely by the scope of the debate and the ambition of his argument, to digress on points that seem better left for clarification in a footnote or a subsequent response. As a consequence, the book’s primary argument is often hard to follow. The upside is that the book contains a wealth of citations from a wide group of thinkers, and brings into contact philosophical perspectives both contemporary and historical that do not often appear together in the same context. One might even hold that this is one of the book’s strengths, since much contemporary action theory seems almost willfully blind to historical predecessors of the debate. This book, therefore, will prove to be a good resource for those interested in the relation between historical and contemporary developments of action theory. Further, it serves as a notice that the naturalistic impulse to reject, or at least avoid, the metaphysical questions that arise in theorizing about action may come at the cost of a comprehensive theory of action.