Abstract
Does the LHS of (PT) entail its RHS? When a person acts (and the action verb is an ergative verb), isn’t it trivially true that he causes, i.e., that he is a cause of, the event intrinsic to the action, trivially true that he brings that very event about? Are all doings causings even if not all causings are doings? It is this question that this chapter addresses.
I do hold that the LHS of (PT) entails the RHS. But should we understand the LHS and the RHS of (CA) as being about two particulars or as using two descriptions of a single particular? I describe one-particularism as the view that takes the second of those options. I strengthen the case for one-particularism by looking at the idea of Cambridge changes (and hence Cambridge actions). I examine two obvious counter-arguments to one-particularism: (a) that, on an action chain, an action doesn’t cause another action, but it only causes the event that is intrinsic to its successor action on the chain, if it has one; (b) Alvin Goldman’s view, shared by many others, that would imply that one-particularism gets the time of an action wrong.
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Notes
- 1.
Notice that (PT ) isn’t the same as the view that an action is the causing of an event. (PT ) just says that an agent acts iff he causes an event intrinsic to his action. On its own, that does not yet commit to what an action is. Nor does it commit to their being such things as causings.
- 2.
Compare (CA) to this entailment:
(CB): FROM ‘surface s is red’ TO: ‘surface s is coloured’. (CB) does not of course speak of two distinct kinds of colouring for s. The conclusion of (CB) is merely less informative than the premise, which is why the premise entails the conclusion but the conclusion does not entail the premise. COLOURED is the determinable; Red is a determinate of that determinable. If a surface is red, it does not have two colours: red and coloured. Saying that a surface is coloured is just to say less about its colour status than to say that it is red, or any other determinate colour. So even if ‘coloured’ is a red-free description of a surface, it does not follow that the surface itself is red-free. ‘The colour of the surface’ refers to its redness, without that being obvious from the description itself.
- 3.
Davidson, Donald 1967 (1980), ‘The Logical Form of Action Sentences’.
- 4.
But not always: sometimes both of the relata really change. If you and I wrestle, the wrestling is a real change in us both.
- 5.
For Cambridge changes in numbers, see Dummett 1973: Chapter 14, ‘Abstract Objects.’
- 6.
I have been influenced by Larry Lombard’s reply to my earlier account of ‘Cambridge events’ (Lombard 2003). I trust that I have addressed the second ‘main problem’ he had about my earlier account.
- 7.
For completeness, it may be worth mentioning that I do think that there is another kind of Cambridge change in which there really are two changes, one real and the other Cambridge. For example, when Socrates drank hemlock and died, Xantippe became a widow. These are two changes, not one, but they pair with one another in an obvious, non-contingent way. The first change is a change in Socrates; the other, a change in Xantippe. The two changes did happen at the same time, but they need not have done so. There could have been a legal convention that a woman only becomes a widow a short time after her husband’s death. And the two descriptions certainly involve different constituent properties: being a widow and drinking-hemlock-and-dying. And they occur to different subjects. It seems to me to be important not to conflate these two different kinds of Cambridge changes. There may even be other kinds. But I stress the only kind I am discussing in this chapter is the first kind, in which there is only one change, not two, and such that typically (in the case in which P does not cause the change in himself) one of the relata really changes and the other only Cambridge changes.
- 8.
- 9.
My own opinion is that the idea of a process in action theory is often an illegitimate extension from its core application; that core application is well described by Munsat (1969).
- 10.
In the example I gave of an action chain earlier in the chapter, I claimed that the multiplicity was in the actions and not the descriptions. So I believe in that case. Goldman says that the causal generalisation relation (the ‘by-relation’) is ‘asymmetric, irreflexive and transitive’ (23). But I am even not committed to thinking that there can be no example of an action chain pair in which the same action figures twice, under a different description each time. I remain neutral on this further claim.
- 11.
Donald Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, reprinted in his Essays on Actions and Events, 1970 (1980).
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Ruben, DH. (2018). Doing and Causing. In: The Metaphysics of Action. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90347-7_6
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