Abstract
What is special about successful action explanation is that it reveals what the agent saw in her action. Most contemporary philosophers assume that this amounts to explanation in terms of the reason for which the agent acted. They also assume that such explanations conform to a realist picture of explanation. What is disputed is whether the reason is a psychological state (Psychologism) or a normative state of affairs (Anti-Psychologism). I argue that neither psychological states nor their contents suffice to make actions intelligible in the right way (such theories fail to meet what I call the Reasonableness Constraint), while Anti-Psychologism can’t explain acting on bad reasons (it fails the Bad Reasons Constraint). The alternative that I propose, Proceduralism, has it that explaining an action requires simulating the agent’s practical deliberation. On this view, explanation is not grounded in reasons, and thereby avoids the problems with “bad” reasons that Anti-Psychologism faces. Instead, in simulating to the same conclusion as the agent, the “explainer” comes to see what the agent saw in her action, thereby satisfying the Reasonableness Constraint. Proceduralism requires giving up on the assumption that the reason for which the agent acts explains the action and on the realist picture of action explanation. In addition, it accounts for the incomprehension that explainers experience when they encounter “alien” psychologies – psychologies that are deeply different from their own.
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Notes
Although there are points of contact between the approach I sketch and simulationist views of mind-reading, to call it simulationist would be confusing. For one thing, my view is not supported by work in empirical psychology, for another my concern is with one type of action explanation – narrowly defined below - but nothing else, and finally, I do not concern myself with the truth or falsity of the theory. My view has more in common with and owes greater debts to, for example, Dray (1957), Kim (1998, 2010), Stueber (2006).
For an insightful recent discussion of the debate and its long history, see Karsten Stueber (2006).
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to the participants at the Everyday Reason Talk workshop in Leusden 2011 for excellent discussion of an early version of the paper. I would particularly like to thank my commentator, Alexandra Varga, for a very thoughtful and helpful response. Some of the ideas in the paper were further developed at a symposium on action explanation at the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting in London in 2012. Thanks very much to Giuseppina D’Oro for sharing her paper with me, for giving me an opportunity to comment on it, and for very helpful discussion of the issues. Thanks also to Constantine Sandis and David Ruben who were co-symposiasts. I gave an earlier version of the paper at Keele University in 2012, my thanks to audience members for very helpful comments. Thanks to Sean Power for commenting on an early draft and to Antti Kauppinen for reading early drafts and for very helpful discussion of the issues. The paper has improved greatly as a result of insightful challenges from two anonymous referees, my thanks to them for the time and effort that they took with it. Thanks also to Katrien Schaubroeck for insightful comments on an earlier draft and for being a most helpful and accommodating editor.
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O’Brien, L. Beyond Psychologism and Anti-Psychologism. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 281–295 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9577-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9577-5