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Act Individuation: An Experimental Approach

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Abstract

Accounts of act individuation have attempted to capture peoples’ pre-theoretic intuitions. Donald Davidson has argued that a multitude of action descriptions designate only one act, while Alvin Goldman has averred that each action description refers to a distinct act. Following on recent empirical studies, I subject these accounts of act individuation to experimentation. The data indicate that people distinguish between actions differently depending upon the moral valence of the outcomes. Thus, the assumption that a single account of act individuation applies invariantly seems mistaken.

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Notes

  1. Besides Goldman, Kim (1969, 1976) has offered a maximizing account of event individuation. If one believes the prevailing assumption that actions are events, then one can apply Kim’s account to actions. For purposes of this paper, my focus will be Goldman’s maximizing account of act individuation. Perhaps some of my future projects will address Kim’s account of event individuation directly.

  2. Goldman (1970, 1971) presented a maximizing account of act individuation. But his recent work suggests that he has revised the maximizing account of act individuation, based upon his research in developmental psychology and cognitive science (Goldman 2007). It is difficult to say whether Goldman has withdrawn support of his original view because (i) his recent article frames the maximizing account very favorably and (ii) the aim of the recent work is to show that developmental psychology and cognitive science inform debates in metaphysics. This paper presents empirical studies that seem to support Goldman’s two-systems view. I discuss below what the two-systems view is.

  3. For purposes of this paper, I will not summarize the various relationships Goldman says may hold between act-types and act-tokens.

  4. See, e.g., Adams and Steadman 2004a, 2004b; Cushman and Mele 2008; Feltz and Cokely 2007; Hindriks 2008; Leslie et al. 2006; Machery 2008; Malle 2001, 2006; Malle and Knobe 1997; Mallon 2008; McCann 2005; Meeks 2004; Nadelhoffer 2004a, b, c; Nado 2008; Nanay 2010; Nichols and Ulatowski 2007; Phelan and Sarkissian 2008, 2009; Sripada 2010; Turner 2004; Wiland 2007; Wright and Bengson 2009; Young et al. 2006.

  5. The conditions were counterbalanced to determine whether any order effects were present. None were detected. I will admit that the first study did not include a sufficient number of subjects to make any overwhelming claims about individuation of action, but the results did give me reason to continue testing subjects.

  6. These two criticisms are in addition to the usual criticism that the subject pool was too small to make any substantive points about action individuation.

  7. I thank an anonymous referee for pointing out this potential problem.

  8. Someone might wonder why I used “thing” rather than “act.” Thing is less loaded than act. I say this and defend it in three ways. First, Jennifer Hornsby (1979) has pointed out that “I did the same act as you” asserts an identity between actions (i.e., the minimizing view), while “I did the same thing as you” does not. Since my experiment tries to discover what ordinary talk might reveal of the identity of actions, I did not want my question to overly burden the multiplier or the componential view. One may even say that if I had used “same act(ion),” then my experiment begged the question against the two other views. Second, many action theorists, such as Goldman (1970), have noticed a relevant distinction between the terms “act” and “action.” In fact McCullagh (1976) has argued that the impasse between the different accounts of individuating actions may be settled by more carefully distinguishing between actions and acts. I did not want to discuss the distinction between act and action or to be compelled to discuss the distinction with subjects, so I decided to use thing instead. Finally, the term “thing” does not necessarily stand in for “objects” or “entity” for ordinary folk as it may for philosophers. Philosophers may think that “thing” refers to an nondescript object, but the folk read “is x the same thing as y?” as we philosophers might read, “is x qualitatively the same as y?” This final reason was based on talking with a few non-philosophers about my experiments. When I asked, “is operating the pump the same as poisoning the inhabitants?” Their responses included: “yeah, they’re the same thing” or “naw, they’re not the same thing.”

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Eric Amsel, Adam Feltz, Joshua Knobe, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, Sarah Paul, Bill Ramsey, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, as well as audience members at the 2008 MidSouth Philosophy Conference, the 2010 Joint Meeting of the North Carolina Philosophical Society and South Carolina Society for Philosophy, and the 2010 Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology for helpful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful for two anonymous referees employed by the Review of Philosophy and Psychology who were instrumental in helping improve the quality of this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Wyoming, Dept. 3392, 1000 E. University Avenue, Laramie, WY, 82071, USA

    Joseph Ulatowski

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Ulatowski, J. Act Individuation: An Experimental Approach. Rev.Phil.Psych. 3, 249–262 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-012-0096-1

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