Interpretative Explanations

Abstract

Commonsense explanations of actions, in terms of the agent’s reasons, hopes, desires and the like, are on their face frequently teleological in form. They specify the goals, purposes or points of the things we do. In this they seem sharply different from other sorts of commonsense explanations of events, as well as from the sorts of explanations found in sciences such as physics and chemistry, all of which are causal, and of course not teleological. But actions are often simply constituted by events involving the agent of the action. And these events are obviously open to causal explanation as long as we describe them in terms of their physical or chemical makeup. So there is a puzzle here. How can commonsense explanations of actions, which are apparently teleological and hence not causal in form, actually explain these actions?