What are actions?

I finally have some time to start working on my research papers again. The one I'll tinker around with today is coming out of my phd thesis and is largely based on chapter three, one of the key chapters defending a big idea.

The whole thesis is centered around the question 'What are actions?' Is this a good question? Is there one answer to it? What kind of answers are there to the question? How should we go about finding this out? And what IS the answer really? As you can see this is quite a handful. These are some questions folks working on philosophy of action deal with.

There has been a lot of discussion of what actions are and most answers have been Monistic: they said acton is 'x' and that's the end of it, meaning that all actions fit the same bill. I think this is fairly implausible, but how implausible it is depends of course on what exactly we substitute for x, how broad our definition is. For example claiming that actions are changes is not too narrow and not too implausible. Arguably, there are actions which are the prevention of change. But most actions do involve change probably. Whether the action is the change itself or a bringing about of a change, or something involving both is a further question. You see, these are the kind of difficulties we get even with a simple attempt to pin down actions.

If you offer a narrower definition, say, something like Donald Davidson's the problems become even worse. Davidson characterised actions as events. But not any event of course only ones of which the following is also true:
- all actions are events caused by a pair of mental events which are the onset of a belief and a desire,
- this pair of belief and desire provides a reason for you to act, together they can be cited to explain why you acted,
- the belief and desire cause the event of your action in the right way,
- and only events that can be described as (maybe under among other things) bodily actions are actions.
The last clause goes against the very simple and obvious insight that thinking hard about something is an action agents engage in from time to time. It is also hard to see how an action can be an event which which is caused by two mental states. What is the agent doing while this is happening? Sleeping? Observing? Or is this all that an agents' involvement consists of? What happens after the causation? Is the event of a bodily movement just going on and the belief and desire just sitting around? Or are the sustaining and guiding the action? Or is that up to the agent? Not to mention qualms about Davidson's specific view of what events are which causes further issues for action individuation.

You can see that such a simple and very restrictive definition throws up more questions than it answers. Hence I've proposed a pluralistic framework. More about that in following entries. Plenty more on actions and research on actions can be found here.