## 1. About the Question: What is an Action?



The central question in philosophy of action is standardly taken to
be: "What makes something an action?" However, we obtain
different versions of the question depending on what we take as the
contrast class from which actions are to be differentiated. The
different questions in turn encode important presuppositions. First,
we may understand the question as asking us to differentiate between
intentional action and the notions of acting and activity considered
above (cf. Hyman 2015). Most commonly, however, the question is taken
in terms of Wittgenstein's classic formulation: "What is
left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact
that I raise my arm?" (1953 [2010], SS621). A common, though
contested, reading of this passage is this: there are certain events
of an arm's going up that are actions, and some that are not
(e.g. if someone tickles me in my sleep). What further factor does the
action have that the event resulting from tickling lacks?



Many historical as well as contemporary thinkers hope to answer just
this question. A simple answer, common in the early modern period
(e.g. Descartes 1641 AT VII 57; Hobbes 1651/1668, i.6; Hume 1739-1740
T II.3.iii; SB 413-18), is that what distinguishes actions from other
events is that they are the causal outcomes of desires, volitions, or
acts of will. A modern version of this view, considered below, appeals
instead to intentions, regarded as distinctive mental states. Despite
the intuitiveness of these "standard" answers, there have
been increasing worries that they are based on disputable assumptions.
First, there is an assumption about the metaphysical category to which
actions belong. Although it is natural to take them as events, some
philosophers have argued that there are good reasons to group them
under a different category. Second, the common reading of
Wittgenstein's question presupposes what has been called
"additive" or "decompositional" conceptions of
action (Ford 2011; Lavin 2015, 2013; cf. Boyle 2016): it is assumed
that an account of action can be given in terms of distinct, and
simpler components. However, a number of authors have argued that this
reductive project is bound to fail (Anscombe 1995; Vogler 2001;
O'Brien 2012; Levy 2013; Horst 2015; Valaris 2015; Della Rocca
2020, ch.4).



It has also been contended that philosophers who offer the standard
answers make important methodological assumptions. These philosophers
approach questions about agency as though they were on par with
scientific questions to this extent: they seek mechanistic, or causal
explanations of agency, explanations that can be grasped from an
objective perspective. However, drawing inspiration from Kant, some
philosophers contend that philosophy of action should be done from the
agential perspective (Nagel 1989; Korsgaard 2009; Bilgrami 2012;
Schapiro 2021); and other philosophers drawing from Aristotle and
Frege have argued for similar views (Thompson 2008; Lavin 2013; Ford
2017). From a different standpoint, the standard methodology has been
criticized as not being scientific enough. It has been argued that
certain empirical results disprove some of the basic assumptions
behind these answers. For example, Libet's experiments have been
taken to suggest that intentions are causally ineffective, and that to
understand the true causes of action we would have to focus on neural
processes ('action potentials') about which we could only
learn through standard scientific methods (Libet 1985; Libet et al.
1993). Although these radical views are now widely held to be based on
faulty conceptual and empirical grounds (e.g. Mele. 2010; Levy 2005;
Brass, Furstenberg, and Mele 2019), surprising scientific results
continue to challenge commonly held views in philosophy of action (see
e.g. Wegner 2002 and Nahmias 2014 for critical discussion of recent
findings).



In this entry we draw from the work of philosophers working through
different methodological paradigms. We will not bring up these
differences again, but they may be worth keeping in mind as we
consider the various debates below.


## 2. Causalism and Causal Theories of Action



Possibly the most widespread and accepted theory of intentional action
(though by no means without its challengers) is the causal theory of
action, a theory according to which something counts as an intentional
action in virtue of its causal connection to certain mental states. In
fact, this view is often dubbed (following Velleman 1992) the
'standard story of action'. Although other philosophers
proposed similar views before, the contemporary causal theory of
action, or "causalism," was pioneered by Donald Davidson,
especially the essays collected in Davidson (2001a). Davidson has
contributed to many topics in the philosophy of action, such as action
individuation, the logical form of action sentences, the relation
between intention and evaluative judgments, among others, but here we
will focus mostly on his arguments for, and his formulation of, the
causal theory of action. In *Action, Reasons, and Causes*
(ARC), Davidson provides an account of the nature of rationalizing
explanations of actions, or what is often called 'intentional
explanations'. Such explanations explain the action by providing
the reason why the agent acted. ARC tries to understand how a reason
can explain an action. The two central theses of ARC, or modified
versions of them, became subsequently widely, though certainly not
universally, accepted. The first thesis is that the explanation of an
action involves a "primary reason": a belief and a desire
pair that rationalizes the action by expressing the end pursued in the
action (desire) and how the agent thought the action would accomplish
this end (instrumental belief). So, for instance, in "Larry went
to Gus the Barber because he wanted a haircut", Larry's
action is explained by a desire (his wanting a haircut) and a belief,
left implicit in this case (his believing that he could get a haircut
by going to Gus the Barber). The second central thesis is that the
primary reason is also the cause of the action.


### 2.1 Davidson's Predecessors and the Central Arguments in the Debate



Davidson's view in ARC is presented against a number of
philosophers (mostly influenced by Wittgenstein), who, on his view,
take action explanations to provide a different kind of understanding
than causal explanations (for a sympathetic overview of this
Wittgenstein-inspired work, see Sandis 2015). Some of the identified
targets of the paper (such as Melden 1961) are clearly arguing for the
views Davidson rejects. Others (such as Anscombe 1957 and Ryle 1949)
do not clearly embrace the theses Davidson objects to, or at least not
all of them. These philosophers took intentional explanations to
display how an action is made intelligible or justified. So Melden
says that "citing a motive [gives] a fuller characterization of
the action; it [provides] a better understanding of what the [agent]
is doing" (Melden 1961, 88). Similarly, Anscombe's special
sense of the question "Why?', discussed below (section
4.1), is supposed to pick out the particular way in which actions are
explained. This claim is not one that Davidson denies; according to
Davidson, in intentional explanations, or
'rationalizations', "the agent is shown in his Role
of Rational Animal ... There is an irreducible ... sense in
which every rationalization justifies: from the agent's point of
view there was, when he acted, something to be said for the
action." (Davidson 1963, 690-1). But Melden, and other
Wittgensteineans, argue that this kind of explanation cannot be a
causal explanation. Melden's central argument is the
"logical connection" argument. According to Melden, since
the supposedly causal antecedents of an action (mental items such as
desires and intentions) are logically related to the intentional
action (I would not count as intentionally signalling a turn if I did
not desire/intend to signal a turn), the explanation of the action in
terms of such mental items cannot be an explanation in terms of
"Humean causes". After all, Humean causation connects
events that are logically independent.



Davidson's ARC exposes a crucial fallacy with Melden's
argument (similar problems had been pointed out by Annette Baier (then
Annette Stoop) in Stoop 1962). Accepting Hume's account of
causal relations does not commit us to the view that any description
of a cause is logically independent of any description of its effect.
An event can only be described as "sunburning" if it is
caused by exposure to the sun, but this does not mean that the cause
of a sunburn is not a "separate entity" from the sunburn.
We can describe an event as "The event that caused X"
without thereby refuting Humeanism about causation. Davidson argues
that, on the contrary, the mental items cited in an action explanation
can only explain the action if they are also the cause of the action
(the second central thesis of ARC). In our example above, Larry might
have had other belief-desire pairs that rationalized his action of
going to the barber. For instance, Larry might also have wanted a
bottle of cream soda and believed that he could procure such an item
at Gus the Barber. However, he did not (we may stipulate) go there
because he wanted cream soda but because he wanted a haircut (and
believed he could get one at Gus the Barber). The only way we can
explain the difference between potentially rationalizing, but
non-explanatory belief-desire pairs, is that the belief-desire pair
that genuinely explains the action, the primary reason, also causes
the action. The question of how non-causal theories can distinguish
between merely potentially explanatory reasons for an action from the
reasons that actually explain it became known as
"Davidson's Challenge" to non-causal theories of
action (Mele 1992; Mele 2013).


### 2.2 Davidson on the Nature of Intentional Actions



Although initially presented as an account of the nature of action
explanation, Davidson's account also contains the basic
structure of an understanding of human action: according to Davidson,
a true action statement (of the form "x ph-ed") denotes
an event, and more specifically, a bodily movement. A bodily movement
is an action if, and only if, the event is an intentional action
(Davidson 1971). Davidson does not say this
 explicitly,[2]
 but clearly on his view, an event is an intentional action under a
certain description, if and only if, there is a true rationalizing
explanation of the event under this description. Davidson (1971)
(following Anscombe) points out that "x ph-ed
intentionally" creates an intensional context; that is whether
an action is intentional depends on how the action is described. To
use Davidson's example, if I flip a switch, I also turn on the
light, and alert the burglar. On Davidson's view "flipping
the switch", "turning on the light", and
"alerting the burglar" are all descriptions of the same
action. The "accordion effect" (so dubbed by Feinberg
1965), characteristic of human action, makes it the case that the
causal consequences of an intentional action provide further
descriptions of human actions. If my flipping the switch caused the
light to go on and the burglar to be alerted, then I also turned the
light on and alerted the burglar. However, only the first two are
intentional actions. On Davidson's view, all these descriptions
are descriptions of the same action; alerting the burglar is an action
in virtue of the fact that these same bodily movements, under a
different description, are a case of intentional action (flipping the
switch). Thus Davidson concludes that, "we never do more than
move our bodies: the rest is up to nature" (Davidson 1971, 23).
We can see now how the claims developed in these papers provide us
with a theory of action: an action is a bodily movement such that,
under some description, the bodily movement is causally explained by a
primary reason.



This also gives us the barebones of a causal theory of action:
according to "causalists", intentional action is explained
in terms of mental states that are the causal antecedents, or
concomitants, of the agent's behaviour or bodily movement.
Subsequent to Davidson, causalists have aimed to provide reductive
explanations: intentional action is identified with behaviour or
bodily movement (or in less "ambitious" versions of the
view, a more general form of action, see Setiya 2011) whose causal
antecedents (or concomitants) are certain specified mental states.
Although Davidson himself is often portrayed as proposing a reductive
analysis, he never presents any of his views as fulfilling such
ambition and expresses skepticism that such analysis is possible given
the problem of deviance (see below).


### 2.3 Mental states as the causal explanans of actions



The idea that an action is rationalized by its mental states is still
very popular; much less so is the view that the only relevant states
are beliefs and desires (though see Sinhababu 2017 for a modern
defense of this simple "Humean" account). As Bratman
(1987) argues, desires do not have the conduct-controlling and
settling functions characteristic of intentions, and thus intentions
seem to be better placed to be at the center of an account in which
intentional actions are constituted by their causal genesis. My desire
to have my teeth cleaned, when conjoined with my belief that in order
to get my teeth cleaned I need to go to a dentist, will not result in
my moving towards the dentist until I actually *intend* to go
to the dentist. In fact, when Velleman comes to dub this kind of
causal theory of action "the standard story of action", he
explicitly describes the view as one in which intention plays a
central role between the "primary reason" and the action.
In the standard story, the agent's "desire for the end,
and his belief in the action as a means ... *jointly cause an
intention to take it*, which in turn causes the corresponding
movements of the agent's body." (Velleman 1992, 461).
Davidson (1970b) himself came to accept that intentions play an
important role in the causation and constitution of action and that
intentions could not be reduced to beliefs or desires. But common to
all these views is the idea that human actions are events that bear
the right kind of causal relation to certain mental states or events
of the agent that also explain the action.



One alternative to the causal view understands agency as a form of
irreducible agent-causation. Chisholm (1964) presents a classic
version of the view; Alvarez and Hyman (1998) presents a radically
different version which denies that agents cause the actions
themselves; Mayr (2011) develops a version of the view that, unlike
Chisholm's version, tries to show that human agency is not
essentially different from other forms of substance causation that we
find in the natural world. A second alternative sees intentional
explanations as teleological rather than causal explanations (Wilson
1980; Cleveland 1997; Schueler 2003; Sehon 2005); that is, an
intentional explanation cites the goal, the purpose, or the reason for
which the agent acted *rather than* the antecedent causes of
the action. Defenders of this view also try to provide an
understanding of the teleological structure of intentional action that
denies that teleological explanations reduce to causal explanations;
they are instead a *sui generis* form of explanation. One way
this view can meet Davidson's Challenge is to argue that the
truth of certain counterfactuals distinguishes potential reasons from
the actual reasons. For instance, it could be true that even though
the fact that the asparagus was delicious was a potential reason for
Mary to eat asparagus, she would not have eaten them if they were not
healthy and she would have eaten them even if they were not delicious
(Lohrer and Sehon 2016); such counterfactuals, on this view, are
not grounded on causal relations between mental states and the bodily
movements, but on the teleological structures that constitute
intentional action. Finally, the causal account also contrasts with
the neo-Aristotelian view in which human action is constituted,
roughly, by a special form of practical knowledge (Anscombe 1957); on
this view, in intentional action, "knowledge is the [formal]
cause of what it understands" (see section 4 of this entry).


### 2.4 The Problem of Causal Deviance



Let us take the following as the general form of a (reductive) causal
theory of action:



> 
> An event (bodily movement) *B* is an intentional action if and
> only if it is an event caused by mental states [S1,
> ... Sn].
> 



We can immediately see how to generate counterexamples to any such
formula: find cases in which there is a causal path from
[S1, ..., Sn] to *B*, but not
through the "normal" causal path that would presumably
give rise to the bodily movement in a genuine case of action. This is
the problem of deviance for the causal theory of action; Davidson
himself was among the first who provided classical examples of such
causal deviance for his own account of action (but Frankfurt
1978's presentation of the problem was particularly
influential):



> 
> A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of
> holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his
> hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This
> belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his
> hold, and yet it might be the case that he never chose to loosen his
> hold, nor did he do it intentionally. (Davidson 1973, 153-4)
> 



This is a case of what is often called "primary deviance"
(Mele and Moser 1994), in which the bodily movements in question are
not even actions, but the causal theory seems to imply they are. In
contrast, in cases of "secondary deviance'', the
theory misdescribes one of the consequences of the action as
intentional when it clearly is not. The same Davidson paper provides
an example of the latter:



> 
> A man may try to kill someone by shooting at him. Suppose the killer
> misses his victim by a mile, but the shot stampedes a herd of wild
> pigs that trample the intended victim to death. Do we want to say the
> man killed his victim intentionally? (Davidson 1973, 152-3)
> 



There are very many attempts to solve the problem of causal deviance
for a causal theory of action and we cannot cover in detail any of
them or mention all of them; here we'll just list a few
influential strategies (and, of course, some solutions incorporate
more than one of these strategies). The first appeals to the notion of
a "proximate cause" (Mele 1992) such that an action is
intentional only if, for instance, the formation of an intention to
ph is the proximate cause of your ph-ing. Another family of
solutions appeal to sensitivity and feedback conditions (Peacocke
1979; Bishop 1989; Smith 2012): the climber's bodily movements
would not count as an intentional action because they would not be
sensitive to variations in conditions and information on what needs to
be done (the climber would not release their hands differently if the
rope turned out to be stickier or would not change their behaviour if
they were to realize that the rope had a safety latch fastened to
their hips). A different type of approach (though with some relevant
similarities to the latter) takes the central problem for the
Davidsonian approach, the reason why the problem of deviance is
endemic to Davidson's causalism, to be the attempt to understand
action in terms of its *causal antecedents*, rather than its
*sustaining* causes. For Frankfurt (1978) the relevant causal
mechanisms involved must be guiding the action. Given that action is a
form of purposive behaviour, we cannot hope to understand what
distinguishes action from mere bodily movements by focusing on what
*precedes* the action, rather than by what happens *while
the agent is acting*. As Setiya puts it:



> 
> In the case of basic action, the crucial concept is that of
> *guidance*: when an agent intentionally phs, he
> *wants* to ph, and this desire not only causes but continues
> to guide behaviour towards its object. (It is this condition that
> fails in Davidson's example). (Setiya 2007, 32)
> 



In the case of secondary deviance, a seemingly promising approach is
to require that a "non-basic" action counts as intentional
only if (roughly) it follows the agent's plan (Mele and Moser
1994). Davidson's killer's plan to kill his enemy did not
involve a stampede, and thus it should not count as intentional
action.



Another strategy has been developed by "empirically
informed" philosophers, who hold that attention to the details
of control mechanisms implemented at the cognitive level yields a
response to the deviance problem. For example, it has been argued that
cases of deviance involve lack of attention (Wu 2016), failures at the
fine-grained level of motor (as opposed to distal and proximal)
intentions (Mylopoulos and Pacherie 2019), or failures in the causal
pathways responsible for flexible agency (Shepherd 2021).



Needless to say, there is no agreed upon solution to the problem of
deviance (for general skepticism about the possibility of a solution
see Anscombe 1995; Vogler 2001; O'Brien 2012; Levy 2013; Horst
2015; Valaris 2015); on the other hand, philosophers have also argued
that competing accounts suffer from problems that parallel the problem
of deviant causation for theories of action (Paul 2011b).


## 3. Extended Action



Davidson's work focuses mostly on "punctual
actions", actions that take place very quickly, and that have
already occurred. A typical example of an action for Davidson will be
described by a sentence like "*a* flicked the
switch" (see Davidson 1971). Flicking a switch happens almost
instantaneously; moreover, when I describe my action as "flicked
the switch", the sentence picks up a completed event in which
the action is already done. And flicking a switch, buttering toast,
etc. are actions typically performed from beginning to end without
interruption. In sum, Davidson's typical examples of actions are
short-lived, continuous, and completed actions. Davidson's
conception of an intention follows a similar pattern, focusing on
intentions that are executed in actions that follow the aforementioned
pattern. At first, Davidson takes intentions in (short-lived) action
to be primary, and later (Davidson 1970b) expands the model to
prospective intention (intentions for a future action), but still
focusing mostly on intentions for a simply executed action that
happens to lie in the future. However our actions often extend through
long stretches of time, and seem to rely on future-directed intentions
that govern very complex plans and activities. Moreover, we only seem
to have a completed action when we are no longer engaged in the
relevant activity (when it is true that I've crossed the street
I am no longer engaged in the activities that constitute or are means
to having crossed the street); agency arguably manifests itself only
in action in progress (I am engaged in these activities while *I am
crossing the street*). By keeping our focus on completed action,
we risk losing sight of another seemingly essential feature of human
action: that it extends through time under the guidance of the agent.
Of course, this kind of initial focus on nearly momentary, completed
actions does not necessarily mean that the theory cannot accommodate
extended action that requires complex planning or action in progress
(or any form of agency that necessarily stretches through time). But a
number of philosophers have tried to either expand, modify, or reject
Davidson's theory to account for extended agency or action in
progress, or to argue that a proper theory of action should focus on
the nature and structure of action in progress (Thompson 2008; Ford
2018). This section will focus on extended agency of the former kind,
and the relevance of action in progress will be discussed in section
4.



Michael Bratman's work (Bratman 1987; 1999a; 2007; 2018, among
others) was seminal in arguing for the importance of intentions,
policies, and plans (all of which he classifies as intentions or
planning states) in our understanding of how limited rational beings
coordinate their actions through time and can pursue ends and projects
through extended periods of time. Bratman's planning theory of
agency starts from rejecting Davidson's account of intention,
and replacing it with a new understanding of the function (and nature)
of intentions and planning states. Davidson had identified intention
with an "all-out" or unconditional judgment, "which,
if we were to express it in words, would have a form like "This
action is desirable'" (Davidson 1970b, 55); that is, an
intention is a distinctive kind of evaluative judgment ("this
action is good" or "this action is desirable"). On
this view, to intend to ph is to have ph-ing as the conclusion
of one's practical reasoning. Bratman finds this view
problematic in many ways, but arguably his most important objection to
Davidson's view is that Davidson's theory of intention
misses out one of the "two faces" of intentions.
Intentions, on Bratman's views, are tied not only to intentional
action but also to coordinating plans (Bratman 1987); Davidson's
identification of intentions with certain evaluative judgments seems
incapable of making room for the latter "face". However,
this role of *future-directed intentions* in planning and
coordinating action through time is essential to agency. Among our
future-directed intentions, there are very specific intentions to,
say, make huevos rancheros for brunch later today, but also more
complex plans and projects (my plan to write a book on tricycles is
also a specific, though not significantly filled out, intention for a
specific action or set of actions), and policies (my policy to
exercise once a week is a "repeatable", general, intention
to perform various futures
 actions).[3]



Future-directed intentions have for Bratman at least two important
functions in our deliberation: they have a settling function and a
coordination function. Suppose I am deciding where I am spending my
next vacation, and let us assume that I narrow it down to two
possibilities: Poughkeepsie and Daytona Beach. At some point,
typically much before my first vacation day, I will form an intention
to go on one of these specific vacations (say to Daytona Beach), and
this intention is independent of forming an evaluative judgment in
favour of either option; I might be convinced that they are equally
desirable, but I can only take one vacation a year. Forming the
intention to go to Daytona Beach *settles* the question for me
and ends deliberation on the matter. Since there is intrinsically no
limit on how long I could spend deliberating, this settling function
performs an important role in managing the cognitive resources of
limited beings like us. But future-directed intentions also perform an
important coordinating function in our extended agency. Going on
vacation is a complex endeavour and we cannot successfully engage in
this action without prior planning. If I am going to Daytona Beach, I
need to plan how long I will stay, and what I will do when I am there,
make hotel reservations, etc. These plans will also require more
concrete plans as these actions unfold (if I plan to have snacks with
me for the Indy-500, I need to plan which snacks, and then plan on
where and when I will get them, and then plan on how I will get to the
chosen grocery store, and so forth). Our capacity to form these
different types of future-directed intentions (plans, policies, and
more specific future-directed intentions) allows us to engage in these
complex forms of extended agency (to be "planning agents"
in Bratman's words). In order to perform these functions,
future-directed intentions must resist reconsideration and be stable
through time. If I keep changing my mind after I form the intention to
travel to Daytona Beach, my intention will not have settled the issue
or foreclosed further deliberation. And it will also make both
intrapersonal and interpersonal coordination impossible: if I expect I
will change my mind, there'll be no point in making hotel
reservations at Daytona Beach. Moreover, these functions impose
coherence constraints on my intentions: lack of means-ends coherence,
for instance, will similarly prevent future-directed intention from
functioning properly.



Thus, Bratman, as well as a number of other philosophers afterwards
(for instance, Holton 2004; Holton 2009; Yaffe 2010; Paul 2014),
suggest that an account of planning agency reshapes our understanding
of agency and practical rationality. Bratman (1987) argues, for
instance, that certain dispositions for nonreconsideration are
essential to understanding the rationality of limited agents like
ourselves. Holton (2004; 2009) extends Bratman's account to
another function of a future-directed intention: resisting temptation
when we expect preferences and judgment shifts. We achieve this,
according to Holton, by forming *resolutions*: intentions to
remain firm in our intentions, which are harder to reconsider than
simple desires or (first-order) intentions. (See Paul 2011a for some
skepticism about this extension.)



Bratman also tries to expand his planning theory to explain the
rationality of acting on a future-directed intention even in cases in
which judgment or preference shifts might seem to justify acting
otherwise. In earlier work, Bratman (1999b) appeals to a
"no-regret" condition; roughly, a requirement that we
should not reconsider or revise an intention if we'll regret
having done so at the conclusion of our planned actions. In later
work, Bratman (2018) appeals to the end of self-governance, an end
that is typically shared by human agents, to explain the rationality
of sticking to one's intentions in face of temptation (for
somewhat similar ideas in the context of cooperation, see Velleman
1997). According to Bratman, self-governance is a form of agency in
which the agent acts from a standpoint that is truly his own; a
self-governing agent is guided "by attitudes that constitute
where he stands" (Bratman 2018,
 159).[4]
 On this view, self-governance has both a synchronic and diachronic
form. Synchronic self-governance requires a coherent practical
standpoint at a time that can constitute where the agent stands in a
coherent manner, while diachronic self-governance requires a coherent
standpoint across different times when the agent's plans stretch
through an extended period. Since typically planning agents also have
self-governance as one of their ends, the need for such a coherent
standpoint generates reasons to conform to a requirement not to revise
intentions not only in cases of temptation, but also in cases in which
an agent forms a future-directed intention to choose one of a number
of alternatives that are either indifferent or incommensurable. Even
though in such cases an agent has sufficient reasons to act
differently than she intends (since other options are just as good or
at least on a par), self-governance requires that she preserves a
coherent standpoint over time (for a different way to justify
normative reasons against "brute shuffling" in terms of
self-governance, see Paul 2014; for skepticism about some of these
requirements against brute shuffling, see Ferrero 2010; Nefsky and
Tenenbaum 2022).



Although these challenges to Davidson's original theory of
action are different from the challenges that focus on the nature of
action in progress, some philosophers argue that they are not
unrelated. Tenenbaum (2018; 2020) argues that understanding better the
nature of intentional action as actions that are *always*
extended through time, and the nature of the instrumental reasoning
involved in intentional action in progress, makes Bratman's
appeal to a *sui generis* state of future-directed intention
superfluous in our understanding of practical rationality. On this
view, there is no difference between the rational requirements
governing the various phases of an action in progress and the
requirements governing the execution of a plan that contains various
steps, or of a general intention that contains various instances (and
thus purported requirements that are specific to future-directed
intentions turn out to be redundant or spurious).



On a somewhat different vein, some philosophers have challenged the
view that there is a significant metaphysical "break"
between a prior intention and an action in progress. From the time I
decide to make an omelet, to the time the finished product is on my
plate, my agency unfolds in various stages and phases in pursuit of
this end: I plan to make an omelet, I check which ingredients I need,
I make sure that I leave myself enough time to go to the store while
engaged in other activities in the morning, I buy the milk, go back
home, melt the butter, break the eggs, drop them on the pan, and so
forth. These are all parts, or phases, of the unfolding of the
activity that, if nothing untoward happens, will result in my having
made an omelet. Although we can impose various breaks and divide the
process into "intending", "preparing",
"making the omelet", these breaks are largely arbitrary
from the point of view of the activity itself (Thompson 2008; Moran
and Stone 2009; Ferrero 2017; Russell 2018); a metaphysics of
intention that emphasizes differences risks losing sight of the
continuity of the phenomena (for criticisms of these deflationary
ideas about the differences between the various phases of the
activity from intending to doing, see Yaffe 2010; Paul 2014).


## 4. Practical Knowledge



Whereas the central notion in Davidson's theory of intentional
action was that of *causation*, the central one in
Anscombe's is that of *practical knowledge*. In a famous
passage, she appears to define intentional action as an event that
manifests practical knowledge:



> 
> [W]here (a) the description of an event is of a type to be formally
> the description of an executed intention (b) the event is actually the
> execution of an intention (by our criteria) then the account given by
> Aquinas of the nature of practical knowledge holds: Practical
> knowledge is 'the cause of what it understands', unlike
> 'speculative' knowledge, which 'is derived from the
> objects known'. (Anscombe 1957, SS48)
> 



Only recently practical knowledge has received sustained interest in
philosophy of action. Much of the resulting work aims to clarify and
defend Anscombe's view (Moran 2004; Thompson 2008, 2011; Haddock
2011; Rodl 2011; Small 2012; Wolfson 2012; Marcus 2012;
Stathopoulos 2016; Campbell 2018; Marcus 2018; Frey 2019; Valaris
2021); but several critics question her arguments, as well as
application of the notion to the definition of intentional action
(e.g., Houlgate 1966; Grice 1971; Paul 2009b; 2011b). In response, a
number of scholars who still find inspiration in Anscombe have sought
to accommodate the criticisms by giving up on some of her most
ambitious claims. This section concentrates on contemporary debates
about practical knowledge stemming from Anscombe's discussion,
but we start by briefly examining its origins in ancient Greek and
mediaeval philosophy.


### 4.1 The Nature of Practical Knowledge



The idea that there is a distinctively practical form of knowledge
traces back to Aristotle, who distinguished different ways "by
virtue of which the soul possesses truth" (*EE*
5.3/*NE* 6.3). There are three theoretical forms by which a
scientist grasps the truth: knowledge (*episteme*),
wisdom (*sophia*), and comprehension (*nous*). Practical
knowledge comes in two varieties: the knowledge of the skilled person
about what she makes--skill (*techne*), and the
knowledge of the virtuous person about her actions--practical
wisdom (*phronesis*).



Aristotle's account of practical knowledge is complex, and our
focus shall lie on three points of particular significance. First,
Aristotle claimed that skill is the "cause"
(*aitia*) of the things produced by it. For instance, he
claimed that the craft of building is the cause of the house
(*Phys.* 2.5, 196b26). Second, Aristotle imposed epistemic
conditions on voluntary and, a fortiori, intentional action: according
to him, to act voluntarily one must know, among other things, what one
is doing, to whom, and why (*NE* 3.1 1111a3-6; *EE* 2.9
1225a36-b10). Third, Aristotle identified a distinctive kind of
reasoning associated with practical knowledge, a form of reasoning
traditionally rendered "practical syllogism" (though see
Segvic 2011). Such reasoning begins from a certain good and its
conclusion is an action. For instance, on the basis of thinking that
walks are good after lunch, and that he has eaten lunch, a man might
take a walk (*DMA* 7, 701a13-14). (For more on ancient
views on action, see Parry 2021.)



Several mediaeval philosophers built on these Aristotelian ideas,
especially to understand God's knowledge of creation (see
Schwenkler 2015). Anscombe (1957)'s account of practical
knowledge draws on this tradition. She first characterizes intentional
action as that to which a special sense of the question
"Why?" applies, the sense that requests a reason for
action (SS5). Later, Anscombe appeals to Aristotle's notion
of practical reasoning to connect the notion of reason for action and
the deliberative structure by which an agent determines how to attain
a goal by acting (SS33ff.). What the question "Why?"
reveals, then, is the rational "order" of means-to-ends
that define practical reasoning, and the answers reveal the
descriptions under which the action is intentional.



To illustrate with her famous example of a man pumping water
(SS23): A man is moving his arms up and down. Why? Because he is
operating a pump. Why? Because he is pumping water. Why? Because he is
poisoning the inhabitants of the house (you see, the water is
poisoned). Why? Because he wants to kill them to bring world peace.
The question "Why?" has application only inasmuch as the
agent recognizes himself as acting under the corresponding
descriptions expressed by his answers. As Anscombe notes, if the man
were asked "Why are you pumping water?" and he replied,
"I was not aware I was doing that", then he would not be
acting intentionally under that description (SS6; SS42). The
descriptions that manifest the agent's understanding of what she
is doing are therefore intrinsic to the action: an action does not
count as intentional under a description unless the agent grasps the
action as such (under that description). Such grasp, therefore, cannot
be a separate occurrence (SS42).



This reveals at least one important sense in which practical knowledge
is the "cause of what it understands". It is the formal
cause because the agent's grasp determines what the action is
(an intentional action with a determinate content). In turn, this
shows why, in the phrase Anscombe borrows from Aristotle's
*Magna Moralia,* "the mistake is in the
performance" when it doesn't conform to the judgment
(SS32): qua formal cause, the knowledge sets the standard for what
is known. Whether, like Aristotle, Anscombe holds that practical
knowledge is also an efficient cause is a complex, and disputed
question (see Setiya 2016a for skepticism, and Pineros
Glasscock 2020a for endorsement).



One last important aspect of Anscombe's conception of practical
knowledge is the contention that an agent knows what she is doing
"without observation" (1957, SS8). This is because,
intuitively, whereas I need to look at what is being written on the
board to know what someone else is writing, I don't need to look
at what *I* am doing to know what I am writing. Beyond
intuitive examples, however, it has proven difficult to explain what
non-observational knowledge
 is.[5]
 Nevertheless, there are three points on which there is wide
agreement. First, the class of practical knowledge is a proper
subclass of the class of non-observational knowledge, one that also
includes, for instance, knowledge of our limbs's position
(SSSS9-10). Second, to say that knowledge is non-observational
is minimally to say that it is non-inferential. Third, and finally,
the non-observational character of this knowledge is of the sort
traditionally associated with mental states. Hence, one of the most
remarkable theses of *Intention* is that public
happenings--actions--could be known in the distinctive way
traditionally reserved for internal mental states, so that there would
be "spontaneous knowledge of material reality" (Rodl
2007, 121).


### 4.2 Arguments for a knowledge condition



Anscombe presents several arguments for the claim that to act
intentionally an agent must know what she is doing (call this the
"knowledge condition'), and further arguments have been
presented in the literature. This section surveys four influential
arguments.



One argument has already been mentioned: If a person is asked,
"Why are you ph-ing?" and she (sincerely) replies,
"I didn't realize I was ph-ing" then she
wasn't ph-ing intentionally. It would seem to follow that a
person must know what she is doing if acting intentionally. However,
this argument is unsound. First, the expression "I didn't
realize..." is colloquially used to express complete lack
of awareness, rather than mere ignorance (Schwenkler 2019, 189). At
most, then, the argument would show that the action cannot be
completely beyond the agent's purview. Second, even if the
person's state is in fact knowledge *after* the question
is asked, this may be a conversational effect: By asking "Why
are you ph-ing?", the speaker intimates that the agent is
ph-ing. This puts the agent in a position to know this, but not in
a way that is tied to her agency.



A more promising argument, suggested by Anscombe and endorsed by some
of her followers in some form (Setiya 2007; Marusic and
Schwenkler 2018), appeals to the connection between action and
assertion. It can be stated thus:




Premise 1:
  

If *S* is ph-ing intentionally, then she is in a position to
correctly assert that she is ph-ing.



Premise 2:
  

One can correctly assert *p* only if one knows *p*.



Conclusion:
  

Therefore, if *S* is ph-ing intentionally, she knows that
she is ph-ing.




Premise 2 is the standard claim that knowledge is the norm of
assertion (Unger 1975; Slote 1979; Williamson 2000; DeRose 2002;
Reynolds 2002; Hawthorne 2004). Premise 1 may also look innocuous;
but, as we shall see, there may be cases that speak against it.



There are two more influential arguments inspired by Anscombe that
have been used to defend the connection with knowledge. The first
begins with the observation that a process in progress bears a
non-accidental connection to its completion (Thompson 2011; Small
2012; Wolfson 2012; Valaris 2021). If a house is burning, it would not
be an accident if it is burnt later; and if you are writing a letter,
it won't be an accident if it is written later. What
distinguishes intentional action is that the non-accidental connection
obtains in virtue of the agent's representation--her
intention--to act in some way. That the agent is writing a
letter--even while she takes a break, cooks a snack, and goes to
the bathroom--is true precisely because she represents herself as
writing a letter, and this representation guides her proceedings.
Intentions, in other words ground what Falvey (2000) calls the
"openness of the progressive": the fact that "a
person may be doing something, in a suitably broad sense, when at the
moment she is not doing anything, in a more narrow sense, that is for
the sake of what she is doing in the broad sense" (p.22).
Suppose, then, that an agent is intentionally ph-ing. Then it is
true that she represents herself as doing so, the representation is
true, and non-accidentally so. It is a short step to the conclusion
that she knows that she is ph-ing.



The final argument is based on the claim that intentional action is
action for a reason (Thompson 2013). An agent must therefore be in a
position to give an answer fitting the schema:



(1)
I'm ph-ing because ps.


Now, Thompson (2008) has argued that the most basic way of filling
this schema is one where actions themselves occupy the ps-position
(i.e. where actions are given as reasons). For instance:



(2)
I am moving my hands because *I am pumping water*.


So, in what sort of relation must an agent stand to the fact that she
is pumping water for a sentence like (2) to be true? Hyman (1999;
2015) has argued that the relation must be knowledge (though see Dancy
2000, ch.6). If, then, every intentional action description is one
that the agent could substitute for ps in (1), it follows that
agents must know what they are doing when acting intentionally.


### 4.3 Objections to the knowledge condition



Davidson argued that the knowledge condition, and even a weaker belief
condition, is vulnerable to counterexamples:



> 
> [I]n writing heavily on this page I may be intending to produce ten
> legible carbon copies. I do not know, or believe with any confidence,
> that I am succeeding. But if I am producing ten legible carbon copies,
> I am certainly doing it intentionally. (Davidson 1970b, 92)
> 



In this case, Davidson argued that the agent is making 10 carbon
copies intentionally despite not believing that he is (never mind
knowing); and some recent empirical results appear to support this
verdict (Vekony 2021). Hence, it seems that agents can ph intentionally without
even believing that they are ph-ing.



For a long time, this and similar examples (e.g. Bratman 1987, 37,
Mele 1992, ch.8) were taken as decisive refutations in the literature,
but their force has been contested recently (Thompson 2011; Small
2012; Wolfson 2012; Stathopoulos 2016; Beddor and Pavese 2021; Pavese
forthcoming). The impetus for many of these responses stems from
Thompson's work on the importance of aspect for action-theory.
In particular, actions in progress display what Falvey (2000) has
called "openness", which corresponds to the inaptly-named
"imperfective paradox" in the linguistic literature (more
below): Someone can be doing something and never get around to have
done it (e.g. I can be crossing the street, but never cross it). It is
thus possible for someone to know that they are ph-ing even if they
don't, in fact, get to have ph-ed. To apply these
considerations to Davidson's argument, we need to distinguish
between two cases. First, the normal case where the agent intends to
make 10 carbon copies, but has the opportunity to correct and continue
on if things go wrong (e.g. if he initially only makes 5, but then
makes 5 more). Second, the one-shot case where the agent must make 10
carbon copies in one go (say, because he is competing in a copy-making
tournament). In the normal case, it appears like the agent may know
that he is making 10 carbon copies (even if he doesn't know that
he will complete the 10 in one go). So it raises no problems for the
knowledge condition. What, then, of the one-shot case? Although here
it may be granted that the agent doesn't know that he is making
10 carbon copies, it is questionable whether he is making 10 carbon
copies intentionally. The reason is that *if* he were to make
10 carbon copies as a result of pressing as hard as he can, this would
be too much an accidental result of his performance. But, as we saw
(see section 2.4), accidentality is incompatible with intentional
action. Hence, in the normal case the agent acts intentionally while
knowing, while in the one-shot case he doesn't even act
intentionally.



It is contentious whether the foregoing response works (see Kirley
forthcoming, for criticism), but it shows that Davidson's
example is far from decisive. However, other examples appear to be
immune from this type of response. For instance, Schwenkler (2019)
presents a case of an agent who is trying to fill a cistern in the
kind of environment where doubts that he is doing so are appropriate
(e.g. where he is filling up one of many cisterns, but he knows
several of them are broken, but not which). Suppose, however, that he
is in fact filling up the cistern (it is not broken). If he does so to
poison the inhabitants of the house, Anscombe's question
"Why?" appears to have application, which means that he is
filling up the cistern intentionally, even though the best he could
say is that "he thinks" he is doing so (Schwenkler 2019,
188-9; cf. Vekony, Mele, and Rose 2021; Shepherd & Carter
forthcoming).



The key difference between this case and the carbon copier is that the
agent remains fully in control of her action: the fact that he is
filling up the cistern by moving his arms so and so is no accident.
So, there is no reason to dispute the action's status as
intentional. Still, whatever belief the person might have is unsafe,
as nearby beliefs (such as those relating to the other faucets) are
false. Hence, it isn't knowledge.



Building on similar considerations, Pineros Glasscock (2020b)
presents a version of Williamson (2000)'s anti-luminosity
argument, aiming to show that the knowledge condition is incompatible
with a safety principle, to the effect that to constitute knowledge, a
representation could not easily be wrong. He argues that since agents
can slowly transition from ph-ing to not-ph-ing through changes
so small as to outstrip the agent's discriminating capacities,
agents must sometimes find themselves in situations where they are
acting intentionally but either lack the confidence to possess
knowledge, or, if they have it, it is misplaced. Either way, they do
not know.



Together, these arguments force defenders of the knowledge condition
into an uncomfortable position: if they wish to uphold the knowledge
condition, they must reject safety for practical knowledge. However,
this threatens to undermine the point of counting this as knowledge,
given how epistemically frail it can be. On the other hand, it has
been argued that a suitable understanding of the knowledge condition
may evade these worries (Beddor and Pavese 2021; Valaris 2021).


### 4.4 Weakening the knowledge condition



The knowledge condition remains a controversial thesis in philosophy
of action; but even those who reject it tend to hold that the
connection between intentional action and knowledge is not accidental.
Thus, there is a growing literature that aims to capture an important
connection between knowledge and intentional action in weaker terms.
These views can be categorized according to the term for which they
recommend modification, whether (i) the practical state, (ii) the
epistemic state, or (iii) the nature of the connection between them.
(Naturally, since these are all compatible, some scholars recommend
more than one revision.)



Though regarded as Anscombe's central opponent, Davidson himself
recommended a version of (i). According to him, although agents need
not know what they are doing under every description under which they
act intentionally, they must know what they are doing under *at
least one* description under which the action is intentional
(Davidson 1971, 51). The carbon copier, for instance, may not know
that he is making 10 carbon copies, but he would have to know that he
is making carbon copies, or that he is moving his hands, etc.
Arguably, the idea that practical knowledge is restricted to knowledge
of actions *in progress* is also a weakening of the thesis,
since Anscombe appears to include also knowledge of future actions
(SSSS51-2) and of completed actions such as the knowledge that
I *wrote* my name on the board (SS48) or even of what is
*written* (SS19). Indeed, it has been argued that
imperfective and perfective knowledge are interdependent (Haase 2018).
Finally, other weakenings include the view that agents must know what
they intend (Fleming 1964), what they are trying to do/that they are
trying (Searle 1985; cf. Grice 1971), or what basic actions they are
performing (Setiya 2008; 2009; 2012). Since Anscombe's thesis is
strictly stronger than these, it follows that they will avoid certain
problems that hers faces. However, it is not clear that such retreats
help avoid the general problem, and restricting the thesis to more
immediate occurrences--basic actions, intentions, or
attempts--risks losing on the aforementioned feature that makes
Anscombe's view so interesting: the idea that we might bear the
same intimate epistemic connection to something external as we bear to
parts of our mental lives (Pineros Glasscock 2020b).



Views that fall under (ii) have been influentially defended by several
authors (Grice 1971; Harman 198;1997; Setiya 2007; 2008; 2009; 2012;
Velleman 2001; Tenenbaum 2007; Ross 2009; Clark 2020). A popular
version of this view rejects a knowledge condition in favor of a
belief condition (Setiya 2007; Velleman 2001; Ross 2009; Clark 2020):
if the agent phs intentionally [intends to ph], she believes
that she is ph-ing [believes that she will ph]. Such a view is
arguably better supported by some of Anscombe's own arguments
(such as the argument in terms of conversation dynamics above); and it
seems to preserve a special place for actions as occurrences that are
public but to which our minds bear a special epistemic relation.
However, it has been argued that such views also suffer from problems,
and fail to avoid counterexamples with the same structure as
Davidson's carbon copier, even though they are explanatorily
weaker (Bratman 1991; Paul 2009a; 2009b; Levy 2018). Since authors
like Setiya see the avoidance of counterexamples as a central payoff
of the weakenings, it is unclear whether they are worth the costs in
explanatory value.



Finally, views that fall under (iii) aim to show that even if there
isn't a relation of *entailment* between action and
practical knowledge, there might yet be an interesting connection
between them. For instance, some authors have argued that agents
*normally* or *generally* know what they are doing
(Peacocke 2003; O'Brien 2007; Gibbons 2010; Schwenkler 2015;
2019; Pineros Glasscock 2020b); or that the kind of knowledge
that agents have of their intentional action has special properties,
such as being first-personal knowledge (Dunn 1998; Moran 2001; 2004;
O'Brien 2007; Marcus 2012; Schwenkler 2019).


### 4.5 The possibility of practical knowledge



Regardless of whether one adheres to the knowledge condition (or some
weakened version of the view), it is generally agreed that agents
*can* have a special kind of knowledge by exercising their
practical capacities in intentional action. However, what makes our
practical capacities suitable source of knowledge? Anscombe devoted
little attention to this question, but an answer to it could be the
key to working out a version of (iii) in the previous section.



Here is a simple answer: A person can know that *p* (e.g. that
she (herself) is walking), on the basis of exercising her will,
because when she does so successfully *p* is true. Two related
problems immediately arise for this simple account. First, truth is
insufficient for knowledge. Minimally, epistemic warrant is also
needed, but the simple account does not give even a hint as to how
such warrant could be acquired through agency (Newstead 2006). Second,
there are notorious cases that seem to meet the conditions provided by
the simple answer, but where there isn't knowledge. One case is
lucky wishful thinking (Langton 2004), e.g., if partly on the basis of
optimistic thinking I luckily pull off a jump I would not normally
make. Another is pessimistic thinking (Harman 1986; 1997), e.g., if I
trip partly on the basis of thinking that I will trip. In neither case
do I possess knowledge on the basis of my thoughts, despite the
thoughts bringing about the truth of their contents. At best,
therefore, the simple answer is incomplete, and must be supplemented
with a story that explains how it is that the characteristic thoughts
of the agent differ from wishful and pessimistic thoughts, such as to
provide epistemic warrant.



An influential account of this sort was provided in foundational work
by Velleman (1989). Simplifying somewhat, Velleman argues that human
beings have a core desire to know themselves. Like any desire, this
one will motivate agents to satisfy it. In addition, they have the
capacities to (a) have thoughts about what they are doing and will do,
and (b) have thoughts that are self-referential, e.g. <this very
thought won't make me famous>. Suppose, then, that someone
has the thought <I will go to the store in virtue of this
thought>. Then, given the desire to know herself, the agent will be
motivated to make this thought true. Hence, thought structures of this
sort ('intentions') will give the agent reasons to believe
that what she intends will be true.



Several worries have been raised against Velleman's view. One is
that it makes dubious empirical claims, theorizing about the mind from
the armchair. In response, Velleman (2000a) has provided empirical
support for his more contentious psychological claim, that humans have
a deep desire for self-knowledge. Another worry is that this epistemic
mechanism still looks too much like wishful thinking, believing that
something is the case just because one wants it to be so (Langton
2004; see Setiya 2008; Velleman 2014 for replies). Finally, it is
unclear why, if an agent realizes that the content of her intention is
not realized, she must make it true that it is, rather than simply
give up the belief (that she will act in a certain way). After all, we
can pursue the aim of knowing ourselves both by ensuring that beliefs
about ourselves are true *and* by giving up beliefs about
ourselves that are false.



Worries of this sort led Velleman to distinguish
"directive" from "receptive" cognition
(Velleman 2000, ch.7); but it has led others to consider the
alternative view that practical knowledge is a standard form of
inferential knowledge (Grice 1971; O'Shaughnessy 1980, 2003;
Paul 2009a). On the most sophisticated inferentialist account, due to
Paul (2009a), agents take advantage of the special knowledge they have
of their intentions to make inferences about what is happening and
will happen. Given that intentions are reliably executed, such
inferences reliably yield knowledge. A more radical inferentialist
alternative, suggested by authors like Carruthers (2011) on the basis
of empirical evidence, is that we know our actions on the basis of the
same processes by which we know others' minds: we essentially
predict what actions are most likely to happen, given what else we
know about others' motives and beliefs--it's just
that we know a lot more about our own minds. (Similar views about
self-knowledge in general are defended by Gopnik 1993, and have their
origin in Ryle 1949. For criticisms, see Boyle 2022; Levy 2022.)



Inferentialist accounts give up on a feature that was central to
Anscombe's understanding of practical knowledge, its immediate
character (see e.g. O'Brien 2007). However, Paul (2009a) argues
that the appearance of immediacy can be explained by the fact that
inferences "can take place rapidly and automatically at a
non-conscious level, without the mindful entertaining of premises or
feeling of drawing a conclusion" (p.10). Yet, several challenges
have been raised against inferentialist accounts, including: (i) that
they can't explain the tight nexus between intentional action
and practical knowledge (Setiya 2007, 2008, 2009); (ii) that they
can't explain the first-personal character of practical
knowledge (Wilson 2000; Schwenkler 2012); and (iii) that they at best
give us alienated, observational knowledge (Pineros Glasscock
2021).



There are, finally, several non-inferentialist stories about how
practical knowledge is possible. Some accounts appeal to knowledge-how
or skill as the state by which an intention ensures that its content
is not only true but also justified, so as to amount to knowledge
(Setiya 2012; Small 2012; Valaris 2021). Another view, due to
O'Brien (2007), explains practical knowledge in terms of the
exercise of deliberative capacities. The agent knows what she is doing
because the selection of an action is done via the exercise of
capacities that narrow options in terms of the practical possibilities
of the agent. Others take practical knowledge to be inferential, but
the inference in question is practical inference. On this view,
practical knowledge is warranted by the practical considerations that
constitute the agent's practical reasoning (Harman 1997;
Tenenbaum 2007; Ross 2009; Marusic and Schwenkler 2018;
Campbell 2018; Frey 2019). Finally, some have tried to show that
accounts of epistemic warrant or entitlement designed to explain how
we can directly believe on the basis of perception might explain how
we can directly believe on the basis of our wills (Peacocke 2003;
Newstead 2006; Pineros Glasscock 2020a). As this brief and
incomplete summary indicates, there is not yet anything close to a
consensus about how best to explain the epistemic standing for
practical knowledge.


## 5. The Ontology of Actions



What are actions? The traditional answer is: they are *events*
of a certain sort (e.g. events with a distinctive causal history).
That, at any rate, is the letter of the views found in Anscombe
(1957), Davidson (1963; 1967a; 1967b; 1985), and much subsequent
literature. However, some scholars have recently argued that
Anscombe's position is better captured by the claim that actions
are *processes*, and that there are philosophical advantages to
this view. Yet, others take actions to be something else altogether.
This section explains what this dispute is about, and explores some of
its implications for other ontological debates such as the
individuation of action. It then considers further important questions
about the metaphysics of action, such as whether there must be basic
actions, and whether *Action* constitutes a unified
category.


### 5.1 Events, processes, and more



There are several reasons to categorize actions as events. A central
one concerns their connection to causation (Davidson 1967a; Goldman
1970). Actions are directly implicated in causal relations: modifying
Davidson's example (pp.4-5), the burglar's entering my
house might cause me to turn on the light, which in turn might cause
him to be startled. On the widespread assumption that events are the
primary causal relata, it would follow that actions, such as my
turning on of the light, are events.



Another argument for the event view is that it explains common
inference patterns. As Davidson (1967b) noted, sentences attributing
actions to agents admit of adjectival drop. Thus, a sentence like (3)
entails (4), which in turn entails (5):



(3)
Donald buttered the toast in the bathroom at 12am.
(4)
Donald buttered the toast in the bathroom.
(5)
Donald buttered the toast.


Davidson suggested that the best way to account for these inferential
relations is to assume that at the level of logical form these
sentences quantify over events. So understood, the logical form of
(3)-(5) would be as
 follows:[6]



(3\*)
\(\exists x(\textrm{Buttering}(x) \amp \textrm{By}(x,
\textrm{Donald}) \amp \textrm{Object}(x, \textrm{toast})\ \amp \)
\(\textrm{Location}(x, \textrm{bathroom}) \amp \textrm{Time}(x,
\textrm{12am}))\)
(4\*)
\(\exists x(\textrm{Buttering}(x) \amp \textrm{By}(x,
\textrm{Donald}) \amp \textrm{Object}(x, \textrm{toast})\ \amp\)
\(\textrm{Location}(x, \textrm{bathroom}))\)
(5\*)
\(\exists x(\textrm{Buttering}(x) \amp \textrm{By}(x,
\textrm{Donald}) \amp \textrm{Object}(x, \textrm{toast}))\)


The entailment relations are then easily explained through the
classical rules for conjunction and existential quantification. This
analysis, which has been highly influential in formal semantics,
appears to entail that actions are events, entities with a
spatiotemporal location (since they admit of spatiotemporal
modifiers), that possess the properties denoted by adverbial modifiers
(such as who was engaged in them, or what the object of the action
was).



Finally, perhaps the most straightforward reason to hold that actions
are events, is that this fits naturally with the way we speak about
them. For instance, we say, "The event we observed last night
turned out to be a theft", or "The murder of that woman
was a sad event".



Against this view, a number of scholars have recently argued that
actions (in the sense of concern for philosophy of action) are instead
*processes* (Mourelatos 1978; Stout 1997; Hornsby 2012; Steward
2012; Charles 2018). To understand this claim, we first need to
explain what the distinction amounts to. We can introduce it at an
intuitive level in terms of the aspectual distinction between the
following two sentences:



(6)
Donald is *buttering* the toast.
(7)
Donald *has buttered* the toast.


(6) refers to an ongoing occurrence in the midst of development. As
such, many of its properties are still indeterminate and may change
over time. It may be happening in the bathroom in a matter of seconds
if Donald stays there; but he could take a break, forget about it, and
continue on with it several minutes later in the kitchen. Moreover,
the manner in which it takes place can change as it occurs: it may
speed up (if Donald is suddenly in a hurry) or slow down (if Donald is
distracted by a noise), and he may start doing it more mindfully, or
distractedly. Indeed, however Donald is *doing* the buttering,
it may happen that he never ends up *having buttered* the toast
(a nearby scream might cause him to drop it in the toilet halfway
through). This is sometimes called the "imperfective
paradox": in general, [?]*x* is ph-ing[?] does
not entail [?]*x* has ph'd[?]. By contrast, the event
itself, denoted by (7), cannot speed up or slow down, nor change the
manner in which it is done, since it is already complete. This is why
it has a determinate temporal-spatial location in terms of which some
have sought to individuate it (Lemmon 1967; Quine 1985; Davidson
1985). By contrast, processes do not have an essential
temporal-spatial location: the same process of buttering that is now
taking place at 12:01 could culminate in a minute or in an hour.



The most straightforward reason to think that actions are processes is
that actions appear to have these properties, as is indicated by the
examples used in the previous paragraph (Stout 1997; Steward 2012;
Charles 2015; 2018). Thus, one's action can speed up or slow
down, be done in one way or another at different times in its history,
and may culminate at different times. Indeed, an ongoing action may
never be completed.



The connection between imperfective aspect and processes provides
further impetus for the view that actions are processes (the argument
to follow is based on Michael Thompson's ideas (2008,
122-30), though he rejects the view that actions are processes,
understood as particulars (pp.134-7)). After all, it seems essential
to actions that they can enter into rationalizing explanations
(Anscombe 1957; Thompson 2008; Wiland 2013; Ford 2015; 2017), and such
explanations can easily be given in imperfective language. To see
this, consider again Anscombe's case of a man who operates a
lever to pump poisoned water to a house, with the plan of killing the
inhabitants (Anscombe 1957, SS23). We could represent his thoughts
as follows: "I am moving the lever up and down *because*
I am pumping water to the house *because* I am poisoning its
inhabitants." Indeed, such formulations seem to express
canonical answers to Anscombe's special question
"Why?" (Thompson 2008; Wiland 2013; Ford 2015). However,
we cannot capture the same thoughts without imperfective expressions
(Thompson 2008). The train of thought that goes, "I have moved
the lever up and down *because* I have pumped the water
*because* I have poisoned the inhabitants of the house"
makes it sound like the man is acting on a conditional promise to move
the lever if the men are killed by his hand. This suggests that
whereas processes can directly enter into the kinds of rationalizing
explanations definitive of intentional action, events cannot (except,
perhaps, derivatively), which in turn suggests that actions are
processes.



Finally, it has been suggested that the process view can better
accommodate the type of direct guidance that Frankfurt identified as
essential to intentional action (see above, section 2.4). It seems
attractive to explain the nature of this direct guidance in terms of
how substances in general cause changes by engaging in certain
processes (Hornsby 2012), or in terms of the different ways in which
an agent can manifest her agency in a process (slower, faster, more or
less skillfully) (Charles 2018). And, as Steward (2012) suggests, this
might give a substantial role to the agent in the explanation of
action. By contrast, since events have settled natures and
spatial-temporal properties, it seems that the agent can at best
interact with them in the indirect way in which she interacts with
other objects, such as a car.



It is only recently that an alternative to the event view has been
clearly formulated and defended. As such, much work remains to be done
in this area, and even among defenders of the process view there are
important disagreements. One important disagreement is over whether
processes are particulars (Galton 2006; Steward 2012; Charles 2018) or
not (Stout 1997; Crowther 2011; Hornsby 2012; Crowther 2018; cf.
Thompson 2008). Another disagreement is about whether a unique thing
is a process and an event (at different times) (Steward 2012; Charles
2018), or whether the process and the event are distinct things (Stout
1997; Crowther 2011; Hornsby 2012; Charles 2015; Crowther 2018).



Regardless of how these questions are answered, a remaining challenge
is to explain the *unity* between processes and events, the
fact that there is a non-accidental connection between the process of
buttering, and the event of one's having buttered the toast that
results if the action is successful (Haase 2022). Moreover, it is
worth noting that although the process-view is the most important
alternative available to the events-view, other proposals have been
advanced recently, including the view that actions are thoughts
(Rodl 2007; 2011; Marcus 2012; Valaris 2020). For example, Marcus
holds that to act intentionally just is to judge that the action is to
be done.


### 5.2 The Individuation of Action



The example of the pumper displays another important Anscombean thesis
(endorsed by Davidson, see section 2.2 above): that a single event can
instantiate different properties in terms of which it can be
described. Thus, the same action is at once a *moving of the
hands*, a *pumping of water*, and *a poisoning*.
This was important for Anscombe because she held that actions are
intentional only under some descriptions: for instance, even if the
pumper's energetic moves scare a nearby squirrel, the action
would not be intentional under the description *scaring of a
squirrel*.



The most influential alternative to this "coarse-grained"
account is a "fine-grained" account that individuates
actions (and events, more generally) in terms of their properties (Kim
1966; 1969; 1973; 1976; Goldman 1970). On this view, *A* and
*B* are the same action just in case *A* has all and
only the properties that *B* has; and for each set of such
properties, there is an event. Since moving one's hands, pumping
water, and poisoning are distinct properties, this view entails that
the pumper's moving of his hands, his pumping of the water, and
his poisoning of the inhabitants are distinct actions.



Anscombe complained that treating these as different actions would be
like treating the author of *David Copperfield* and the author
of *Bleak House* as different men, rather than a single author,
Dickens (Anscombe 1979, 222). Indeed, the fine-grained view has
similar counterintuitive implications. Consider: the properties of
pumping water, pumping water while smiling, and pumping water at noon,
are all different properties. So, the man who pumped water at noon
while smiling would have engaged in three different pumpings according
to the fine-grained view.



Moreover, the view threatens to undermine some basic inferences we are
inclined to make about actions (Katz 1978). For instance, it seems
obvious that from:



(8)
The table in the room is brown.


We can infer:



(9)
The table in the room = the brown table.


But, similarly, it seems that from:



(10)
The man's pumping occurred at noon.


We can infer:



(11)
The man's pumping = The man's pumping at noon.


However, on the fine-grained view the inference to (11) is invalid
since the two descriptions in (11) must refer to distinct events.
Hence the defender of the fine-grained view is forced to reject a
seemingly innocuous inference pattern.



These are serious problems, and it is not clear that defenders of the
fine-grained view can do more than bite the bullets. However, it has
been argued that the coarse-grained account has similarly
counterintuitive implications (Goldman 1970; Thomson 1971). To see
why, consider the following two sentences (true of the imagined
pumper):



(12)
The man moved his hands before he poisoned the inhabitants.
(13)
The man caused the poisoning of the inhabitants by moving his
hands.


We can paraphrase them using gerundival expressions as follows:



(12\*)
The man's moving of his hands happened before the poisoning
of the inhabitants.
(13\*)
The man's moving of his hands caused the poisoning of the
inhabitants.


Now, suppose we assume the claim that:



(14)
The man's moving of his hands = the man's poisoning of
the inhabitants.


Then, by substitution, we arrive at the absurd:



(15)
The man's moving of his hands happened before the
man's moving of his hands.
(16)
The man's moving of his hands caused his moving of his
hands.


It is natural to think that (14) is the culprit; but to hold that
claims such as (14) are false seems to amount to rejecting the
coarse-grained view of action individuation.



One possible response would be to hold that the contexts [?]ph
happens\* before ps[?] and [?]ph causes\* ps[?]
(the \* marks tenselessness) are intensional in the ph and ps
positions (Anscombe 1969). If so, substitution of co-referents may
change truth value in these contexts. Alternatively, one could attempt
to explain these results pragmatically: the sentences sound odd in the
same way as it sounds odd to say that "a man married his
widow', even though it is true (the man married her
*before* she was a widow, of course!) (cf. Anscombe 1979).
However, these are controversial semantic theses (for further
intensionalist treatments, see Achinstein 1975; McDermott 1995;
Wasserman 2004; for extensionalist treatments, see e.g., Davidson
1967a; Strawson 1985; Rosenberg and Martin 1979; Schaffer 2005; for an
excellent review of research on causal contexts more generally,
including pragmatic effects, see Swanson 2012).



A different response is suggested by the view that actions are
processes. That view enables us to treat action descriptions as
sometimes characterizing the different stages of the action (cf.
Russell 2018). Then, appealing to Anscombe's insight that we
should treat claims about actions in parallel with claims about
persons, we could say that the moving of one's hands precedes
and causes the poisoning in an analogous way as the acorn precedes and
causes the oak. But just as there is a single organism in the latter
case, there is a single action in the former, even though it seems at
best paradoxical to say that I caused myself to exist, or that the oak
caused the acorn.



Finally, the coarse- and fine-grained views obviously do not exhaust
the conceptual landscape. A number of philosophers have offered
individuation principles stricter than those advanced by
coarse-grained theorists, but laxer than those advanced by
fine-grained theorists (e.g. Ginet 1990). Charles (1984), for example,
argues that Aristotle would individuate actions in terms of
capacities. This allows us to say that the moving of one's hands
is the same action as the moving of one's hands quickly (since a
single capacity is thereby actualized), even though it is a different
action from the poisoning, which actualizes a different set of
capacities. The challenge for this view is to provide an account of
the individuation of capacities independent of the account of the
individuation of actions.


### 5.3 The Debate Over Basic Action



Consideration of cases like that of the pumper naturally raises a
question about their *structure*: what kind of shape could such
a rationalizing explanation take? Could it go on forever? To answer
this, consider the pumper once more, and suppose he poisons the
inhabitants of the house. It is true, then, that he poisoned the
inhabitants of the house by pumping water, and he did this by moving
his hands. Because the poisoning and the pumping are done by doing
something else, they are called "non-basic" actions.
However, it has been argued that there must be at least some actions
that are "basic'", done not by doing anything else.
Otherwise, we appear to be caught in various forms of a vicious
regress.



For example, if to do *A* one must do *B*, and to do
*B* one must do *C*, and so on *ad infinitum,*
doing anything would seem to require doing an infinite number of
things. More worrying, the beginning of action seems to be
"logically out of reach" for the agent, since there is
always something else that she would have to do before she begins to
do anything (Danto 1979, 471). Again, it seems that for an agent to
know what she is currently doing, she needs to know how to do the
things by which she does it; but unless there is something that she
can know how to do just by doing it, it will be impossible for her to
know what she is doing at all (Hornsby 2013).



Arguments of this sort convinced most scholars that there must be
basic actions (though see Baier 1971 and Sneddon 2001 for early
dissent). The debate then centered on *which* actions are
basic. Many scholars held that simple bodily movements, like moving a
finger or raising an eyebrow, were basic, while others held that they
could be more complex (tying one's shoes), or that they must be
simpler: perhaps only mental actions, or tryings were basic. After
all, I move my finger by attempting to move it; and we need to
distinguish between the attempt and the movement, since sometimes the
attempt occurs without the movement (e.g. if my fingers are suddenly
paralized) (Prichard 1945: Hornsby 1980; O'Shaughnessy 1980; see
Cleveland 1997, ch.5 for criticism).



As several scholars have noted, part of what is at issue in this
debate are different notions of basicness, corresponding to different
understandings of the clause "by doing something else"
(Baier 1971; Annas 1978; Hornsby 1980). It is common to draw a
three-fold distinction: (i) know-how basicness; (ii) causal basicness;
and (iii) teleological basicness. An action is know-how basic iff
there is no other (type of) action by which the agent knows how to do
the one in question. An action is causally basic iff there is no other
(token) action that causes it. An action is teleologically basic iff
there is no other (token) action by means of which the agent does it.
To illustrate in a way that highlights the differences, consider
pitching a baseball. Arguably, this action is know-how basic, since
the pitcher may not know a more basic action by which to do it: of
course, the agent may know how to move her hands independently, but
she may be unable to move her hands in the particular way in which she
does when she throws the baseball unless she were actually throwing
the baseball. Whether the action is causally basic depends on whether
we think there is another action that causes it, such as the
pitcher's moving of his hands. Finally, and independently of the
question of causation, the action appears to be teleologically
non-basic, since the moving of his hands is certainly both a means and
an action by which the pitcher pitches. The consensus for many years
was that there must be basic actions in all three senses.



However, this widespread consensus about teleological basicness has
recently been called into question by Michael Thompson and other
defenders of "naive" action theory (Thompson 2008,
107-119). Thompson considers the case of a person, *P,*
who has pushed a stone from point a to o. Let b be
the halfway point between a and o. It seems that if
*P* pushed the stone from a to o intentionally,
then he pushed the stone from a to b intentionally. Now,
let g be the halfway point between a and b. Once
again, it seems that *P* pushed the stone from a to
g intentionally. And so on. It seems, then, that there will
always be a further action by which *P* pushed the stone. In
other words, there is no basic action. Moreover, as a number of
authors have noted (Small 2012; Lavin 2013), the argument can be
generalized for virtually every action, since it can be presented in
terms of a series of time-segments (instead of place-segments), and
virtually every action takes place over time. (For critical
discussion, see Ford 2018.)



Building on this argument, Lavin (2013) presents a further challenge
to the view that there must be (teleological) basic action.
Lavin's argument centers on the relation of the agent to her
actions. Consider first a non-basic action, like poisoning the
inhabitants of the house. The agent's relation to this action is
itself an agential matter, since the agent poisons the inhabitants by
doing something else intentionally (operating the pump). Now consider
an arbitrary basic action, *A*. By definition, the agent
doesn't do *A* by doing anything else. However, this is
an action that occurs through time, so, presumably there are
happenings *h1, h2, ...,
hn* by which *A* takes place. But since
*h1, h2, ..., hn* are
mere happenings, this means that the agent relates to *A*
non-agentially. Now, Lavin grants that it may be possible sometimes
for us to relate to our actions non-agentially; but it would be
alarming if this was necessarily the case, as defenders of basic
action are committed to hold. It would mean that agents are
necessarily alienated from their actions, in the way labourers are
alienated from their labour in Marx's critique of capitalism. In
turn, Lavin argues that this would make it impossible for agents to
have self-knowledge of their own actions, since self-knowledge is
grounded on our agential relation.



There is a growing literature responding to Thompson's and
Lavin's challenges, both refining the arguments, or presenting
objections to it (Setiya 2012; Hornsby 2013; Lynch 2017; Frost 2019;
Small 2019). This is not surprising, since the debate about basic
actions has important repercussions for other questions about the
nature of intentional action. For example, Lavin (2013) holds that
defenders of (teleologically) basic action are committed to a
"decompositional account" of agency (see section 1). After
all, if there are basic actions, we may be able to give an account of
what makes something an action in terms of the non-agential relation
an agent bears to her basic actions. Moreover, Ford (2017; 2018) notes
that Thompson's argument suggests a novel way to pursue action
theory, one that defines action not in terms of *reasons for
action* but, in the first instance, in terms of the means by which
an action is pursued.The latter, Ford holds, better captures the
agential perspective: in the context of deliberation, what the agent
asks is *How* to pursue a particular course of action, rather
than *Why* she is doing something. Finally, the debate may have
repercussions for our understanding of the relation between skill and
intentional action. For example, both Frost and Small suggest that at
the most fundamental level, our agency depends on our exercise of
practical *skills* by which we enter an instrumental order
without consciously representing that order at the level of
propositional thought (Small 2012; 2019; Frost 2019).


### 5.4 Making, Acting, and the Varieties of Agency



Nearly all contemporary philosophers treat *intentional action*
as a unified category. Despite the many differences between moving a
finger, running, hammering a nail, fixing a fridge, eating a sandwich,
acting justly, keeping a promise, and marrying someone, all of these
are treated as equally belonging to a single type: acting. The
assumption is supported by natural language. After all, these are all
legitimate answers to the question "What are you
doing?'.



Aristotle provides us with an alternative view that has had immense
influence in philosophy. Throughout his writings, Aristotle
distinguishes between "making" or "producing"
(*poiesis**)* on the one hand, and
"acting proper" (*praxis*) on the other (an early
version of the distinction appears in Plato's *Charmides*
163a-c). The two are distinguished by their success conditions
(*EE* 5.2/*NE* 6.2 1139b1-4; *EE* 5.5/*NE*
6.5 1140b6-7). The success conditions for makings are external
to them: one succeeds at making insofar as something external to the
making obtains (the product). By contrast, the success conditions for
proper actions are the actions themselves. This is why we pursue them
for their own sake (*ib.*). By this standard, the activities of
hammering a nail, or fixing a fridge count as makings, because the
hammering is successful insofar as something external takes place: a
nail is hammered in a wall, or a fridge is fixed. Precisely because
the success conditions are external, it is possible to succeed at
making something by luck (*EE* 5.4/*NE* 6.4
1140a17-20). By contrast, Aristotle would regard acting justly,
keeping a promise, or marrying someone as proper actions. To succeed
at these actions consists in doing the actions well. A coerced
marriage is not a successful marriage. Hence, these actions cannot be
done by luck. This distinction underlies the aforementioned
distinction between two forms of human excellence in the practical
sphere: skill (*techne*) is excellence at making
(*EE* 5.4; *NE* 6.4 1140a6-23), and practical
wisdom (*phronesis*) is excellence at acting proper
(*EE* 5.5/ *NE* 6.5 1140a25-30 et passim).



Although the distinction is barely mentioned in analytical philosophy,
it has influenced other traditions, such as the Marxist one. From his
earliest writings, Marx accepts an Aristotelian threefold analysis of
labour in terms of the labourer, the process of labouring, and its
product. Marx implicitly rejects the distinction between action proper
and production, in favour of a dichotomy of his own between different
forms of productions. This is because for Marx the characteristic
activity of the human species is conscious free labouring: an activity
that has no end beyond itself (it does not seek anything beyond the
living activity that such labouring consists in) (Marx 1844a; 1844b;
1867). This is what Aristotle took as the distinguishing feature of
proper actions, done for their own sake. One of Marx's central
criticisms of capitalist societies is that it prevents humans from
engaging in such an activity. In capitalist societies, the labourer,
the labour process, and the product all become commodities that serve
as mere means for the enjoyment of the owner of labour and product
("the capitalist"). Members of capitalist societies are,
in this sense, alienated (Marx 1844b; 1867). As such, capitalist
societies make it impossible for humans to engage in their most
fundamental life activity of free production, an activity that the
Marxist tradition came to designate as "praxis" (Petrovic
1983), reappropriating the quite different Aristotelian notion.



Perhaps the most influential modern version of a distinction among
types of practical activity is drawn by Arendt (1998). Arendt
distinguishes between three kinds of practical activities: labour,
work, and action. The most basic of these is *labour*, which
Arendt conceives as simply an extension of our animal lives: a
"metabolism" (Marx's phrase) between the human
animal and the world, characterized by a cycle of consumption and the
production of goods to be consumed, and aiming at meeting our basic
biological needs (p.69). Since this is a cycle, Arendt suggests that
there is no sense of speaking here of means and ends: there is no fact
of the matter as to whether the production of goods is for the sake of
consumption, or the consumption for the sake of production (p.145;
155). Means and ends enter at the next level of practical activity,
*work* (the Aristotelian *poiesis*). Like
Aristotle, Arendt takes the aim of working to be the finished work,
the product, whether it be a work of art, like a painting, a tool,
like a knife, or a way to safeguard living, like a house. The central
importance of work lies in its ability to produce lasting products
that lie beyond the activity of the producer (p.136; 144). Arendt
contends that these products can begin to shape an objective
*world* of objects that stands against the humans who produce
them. However, the world does not emerge in its fullness except by way
of the third level of practical activity, *action* (the
Aristotelian *praxis*). Action is the means by which humans
reveal themselves in the public sphere, a revelation needed to give
reality to a personality that otherwise remains entirely unactualized
in subjectivity. It is thus essentially communicative, and depends on
other humans to whom one might make herself known (pp.38-49; 95;
202-7); and it depends, given its essential ephemeral nature,
for its permanence in the continued existence of a polity that may
preserve words and deeds in more enduring forms, like sculptures and
tales. Ungoverned by either the natural laws of labor, or by the norms
arising from a particular aim, action is for Arendt unproductive,
free, and unpredictable. It is the distinguishing activity of human
beings as such (p.177; 204-6).



The three-fold distinction serves as the basis for Arendt's
criticisms of both ancient writers, including Aristotle, and modern
writers, including Marx. She criticizes Aristotle both for
inconsistently assimilating action too much to work/production in his
analysis of benefaction as producing a work (*ergon*) (p.196),
and for subordinating it to theory (22-23). She criticizes
Marx's subsumption of practical activity in general under labour
for its failure to provide meaning. She notes that Marx ends in the
paradoxical position of concluding that that the aim of labour is
freedom from labour, even though this is the activity he takes as
definitive of humanity. In other words, Marx ends up concluding that
the aim of human life is to do away with human life (p.89; 103; 105).
For Arendt, however, this is not merely a theoretical deficiency, but
a manifestation of a broader social tendency that goes back to Plato:
the tendency to try to make action proper into that which is
not--whether work or labour--to control what is essentially
unpredictable and free.



The problems of subsuming practical activity in general to making find
echoes in some contemporary thinkers. For example, Thompson (2008),
following Baier (1970) and Mueller (1979), criticizes attempts like
Castaneda's (1970) and Chisholm's (1970) of
construing actions in terms of a schemas such as 'bringing it
about that *p*'; such propositional complexes, according
to critics, threaten to undermine the practical form of the thought
they mean to capture (cf. Hornsby 2016, Wilson 1980, pp.111-117 for
further discussion). Arendt herself thought that this tendency
underlay the attraction of utilitarianism, but she argued that, like
Marxism, that view was incapable of ever giving further meaning to our
practical endeavours (p.105). Korsgaard concludes with equal severity
that given a distinction between praxis and poiesis,
"utilitarianism is not a moral theory, for utility is a property
of [productions], not actions" (2009, p.18n26).



Regardless of what one thinks of these arguments, it is evident that
the question whether practical activity comes in varieties, as
Aristotle and Arendt thought, is potentially of enormous
significance.


## 6. Constitutive Aim



The question of what, if anything, is the constitutive (or formal) aim
(or end) of intentional actions is a question about whether there is
anything that all actions necessarily pursue, irrespective of their
particular ends. Some philosophers (Setiya 2016b) deny that there is a
constitutive aim of acting or that there is something that every
action as such aims at. On this view, there is no such thing as an aim
contained in acting as such; each action just aims at its particular
end. On the other hand, many philosophers try to derive important
consequences for ethics from the idea that action or agency has a
constitutive aim. However, we will leave aside the examinations of
these claims and focus only on the question as it pertains to the
characterization of agency. (Cf. Bagnoli 2017; 2022.)


### 6.1 Motivations and Different Versions of the View



What could motivate the idea that actions have a constitutive aim
above and beyond the particular ends they pursue? An important
consideration is that, arguably, only by appealing to a constitutive
aim, can we evaluate actions and have a proper standard of practical
reason. Much in the same way that the aim of belief (generally thought
to be "truth" or "knowledge") might provide a
standard for theoretical reasoning and correct belief, a constitutive
aim of action would provide a standard for practical reasoning and
successful action. More specifically, it seems that some actions are
successful in achieving their particular ends and yet are cases of
practical failures in some deeper way, exhibiting what appears like
practical irrationality or at least some form of practical ignorance.
Suppose I have dreamt all my life to move to Seattle, and I finally
secured a position in the city. However, as I arrive in Seattle and
try to arrange my life, my life in Seattle is a great disappointment;
even though there is nothing important that I found out about Seattle
that I didn't know already, I completely regret having pursued
this end. Although I achieved my aim of moving to Seattle, my actions
seem to have failed in an important way; arguably, I manifested my
agency in a defective way.



Of course, one can explain my disappointment in many ways that do not
seem to presuppose a constitutive aim of action: there were other ends
that I had that conflict with moving to Seattle and I hadn't
fully appreciated this beforehand. Perhaps I no longer care about the
things that made me want to move to Seattle; moving to Seattle was a
means to ends I had abandoned and didn't realize that it made no
longer sense to pursue this end. But it is unclear that these
observations will suffice; it seems that none of this might have
happened and yet my move to Seattle was still a practical failure.



Let us take a concrete example: suppose the constitutive aim of action
is happiness (see Frey 2019 for an argument that this is a view held
by Aquinas). On this view, then, every action (directly or indirectly)
aims at happiness, and the realization of an end that does not result
in happiness is a shortcoming of my agency. Therefore, if my going to
Seattle did not contribute to my happiness, or if, worse, it
contributed to undermining it, then it was a defective case of agency.
This failure is often thought to parallel the kind of internal failure
involved in false beliefs: such beliefs supposedly fail to meet a
standard internal to theoretical cognition.



Another, related, way to motivate the idea that action has a
constitutive aim focuses on the standpoint of deliberation. When
deliberating about what to do, it seems that I need to find an answer
to the question "what to do" or "whether to
ph" (Hieronymi 2005; 2006; Shah 2008); in the good case, my
action expresses an adequate answer to this question. But how could I
go about answering these questions if action did not have a
constitutive aim; if there's nothing that could count as the
correct way of answering this question? Similarly, from the point of
view of action explanation, some answers seem to provide an
intelligible explanation of action while others seem to invite the
question "but why would you aim at (want) *that*?"
If you ask me "Why are we eating the jello?",
"Because it is blue" seems to invite further questions,
while "Because I find the taste pleasant" brings the
inquiry to an end. Anscombe argues that the search for further
explanations ends when we hit a "desirability
characterization", something that is not just conceived as good
but "*really* ... one of the many forms of the
good" (Anscombe 1957, SS40).



There seems to be a parallel structure in the case of belief: in
deliberating about what to believe, it seems that I must be similarly
guided by an ideal of correct belief (Shah and Velleman 2006). In
fact, philosophers who accept that there is a constitutive aim of
action often compare action and belief (Velleman 1992; 1996; Tenenbaum
2007; 2012; 2018b; Schafer 2013). Belief is supposed to have truth as
its constitutive aim, and just as belief is held, at least in the good
case, in accordance with this constitutive aim (as Hume 1748 said,
"a wise man ... proportions his belief to the
evidence"), intentional agency is guided by its constitutive
aim.



There are various proposals of what the constitutive aim of an action
might be. Perhaps the most traditional version of this view is the
idea that the good is the constitutive aim of agency, possibly going
back to Socrates (*Protagoras* 351a-8e; *Gorgias*
467c-8d). The notion of "good" involved here can be
very thin, meaning no more than "considering matters
aright" (Williams 1981) in the realm of practical reason; such
views are versions of the thesis often called "the guise of the
good" (Tenenbaum 2007; Clark 2010; Schafer 2013). According to
the guise of the good, if I ph intentionally, then I must take
ph-ing to be good. Arguably some other versions of the constitutive
aim of agency are specifications of the thin notion of
"good" or "human good" (see Boyle and Lavin
2010). Other constitutive aims that have been defended in literature
are self-understanding or autonomy (Velleman 1989; 1992; 1996; 2009),
self-constitution (Korsgaard 1996; 2008; 2009), and the will to power
(Katsafanas 2013).


### 6.2 Objections



A number of challenges have been raised in the literature to the claim
that there must be a constitutive aim of action. First, suppose we
accept the causal theory of action: an intentional action just is the
effect of a "primary reason". On such a view, it seems
that an intentional action is constituted by its causal antecedents,
rather than by a necessary aim that one has in acting. However, causal
theories are not incompatible with constitutivism. Since on these
views, some of the causal antecedents of the action will be conative
states (like an intention), the question of whether intentional action
has a constitutive aim will depend on whether the conative state has a
constitutive aim or whether a specific conative state must always
figure on the genesis of intentional action. For instance, in
Velleman's early work (for instance, Velleman 1989), intentional
action was an action that was caused by a desire for self-knowledge,
and the content of such a desire was thus the constitutive aim of
agency. Smith (2013; 2015; 2019) also develops a form of
constitutivism that endorses the standard story of action.



Setiya raises a couple of important challenges to the idea that action
has a constitutive aim. According to Setiya (2007), any theory of
action needs to account for the fact that practical knowledge (or a
belief condition in his version; see section 4 of this entry) is
essential to intentional action. However, the belief condition seems
to be conceptually independent of any constitutive aim of action, and
thus accepting that both are constitutive of intentional action
amounts to postulating an unexplained necessary connection.



Secondly, Setiya (2010) relies on the distinction between an
explanatory reason and a normative reason to argue against the
"guise of the good" (see Alvarez 2017 for a detailed
account of the distinction); his argument there could be extended to
other proposals for the constitutive aim of action. An intentional
action is an action done for an *explanatory* reason, namely, a
reason that explains why the agent acted as she did, in
Anscombe's special sense of the question 'Why'.
However, Setiya points out that an explanatory reason need not be a
*normative* reason; in fact, any reason that the agent believes
to be her reason to act can be an explanatory reason, even if the
object of such a reason is not good in any way. But since the reasons
that explain intentional action need not be good in any way, it seems
false that the agent must act only on reasons that she regards to be
good in some way, and thus that she aims at the good in acting.



Philosophers have tried to answer these challenges. One can argue that
a knowledge or belief condition, to the extent that it is valid, is
explained by the constitutive aim of action. Moreover, perhaps the
possibility of a third-person explanation of an action in terms of
explanatory reasons whose objects are not good in any way is
compatible with the fact that from the first-person point of view,
these objects must have been regarded to be good in some way. So even
if the fact that Rugen kills his father explains why Inigo Montoya
killed Rugen without providing a normative reason for it, it still
might be the case that avenging his father must have appeared good
*to Inigo Montoya* in some way if he killed Rugen intentionally
(see Tenenbaum 2012).



Another well-known challenge to the idea that actions have a
constitutive aim is David Enoch's "schmagency"
objection (Enoch 2006; 2011); in this context, the objection raises
the possibility that for any purported constitutive aim, one could
spurn such an aim and merely "schmact" or be a mere
"schmagent"--someone who behaves just like an agent
except for having the constitutive aim of agency. Enoch's
objection, however, is specifically concerned with attempts to derive
normative consequences from the constitutive aim of action (for
further discussion, see Bagnoli 2017; 2022).


## 7. Omission


### 7.1 Different Ways of Not Acting



The scope of our inactivity is vast; at each moment, there are many
things I don't do. Right now, I am not competing in the
Olympics, not writing poetry, not swimming in the English Channel, not
flying over the moon, or taking a journey to the center of the earth.
However, none of the things could be plausibly described as cases of
omissions or refrainings; it would be odd if I were told that I was
refraining from competing in the Olympics or omitting to fly over the
moon. Philosophers often describe cases of omissions as cases of my
failing to do something that I was somehow "supposed to
do" (Bach 2010). Only some of my omissions are intentional or
even voluntary: if my alarm does not go off and I miss my class
because I overslept, I omitted to teach but not intentionally. On the
other hand, if I fail to show up because I am protesting my
university's salary cuts, my omission was intentional.
Intentional omissions and (intentional) refrainings are generally
taken to be the only possible candidates for being instances of agency
among not-doings (see Vermazen 1985 for an expression of this idea).
Thus, we will focus on these cases. The categories of intentional
omissions and refraining are not necessarily identical. If I refrain
from striking my opponent in a fit of anger, it seems wrong to say
that I omitted to strike her as there is no sense in which I was
"supposed to" strike my opponent.


### 7.2 Agency, Omissions, and Refrainings



Suppose all the Faculty at State University are upset about the
recently announced cuts, and each of them express their
dissatisfaction but in different ways: Mary wears a T-shirt that says
"No More Cuts", Terry writes a letter to the local paper,
and Larry simply decides not to go to the department's holiday
party. It seems that in all these cases, the Faculty members are
manifesting their agency--they are all equally expressing their
dissatisfaction with the cuts--even if Larry does so by
(intentionally) *not* doing something. Such cases of
refrainings and intentional omissions seem paradigmatic instances of
agency and yet they do not seem to be cases of action: after all, the
agent did nothing. But how could the absence of an action be a
manifestation of agency? One might be tempted to avoid any puzzling
conclusions by simply denying that omissions are absences; by, for
instance, proposing that Larry's intentional omission consists
in doing whatever acting he did *instead* of engaging in the
omitted action. So if he goes to the bar instead of going to the
holiday party, Larry omits to go to the party *by* going to the
bar and so his going to the bar and his omitting to go to the party
are the same event. However, this view immediately encounters
difficulties as it seems that I can intentionally omit to do things
without engaging in any positive act. I can refrain from laughing at
my enemy's jokes just by staying still and I can intentionally
omit things even while asleep (Clarke 2014): indeed, instead of going
to the bar, Larry could have omitted to go to the party by simply
sleeping through it.



Early attempts to explain how an agent might intentionally
*not* do something, without claiming that intentional omissions
and refraining are actions, go back at least to Ryle (1973); Ryle
argues that negative "actions" are not actions, but what
he calls "lines of actions', a category that also includes
general policies such as "Take only cold baths". More
recently, Alvarez (2013) argues that the fact that omissions and
refrainings can also manifest agency is a consequence of the fact that
the power to act (intentionally) is a two-way power: a power to either
do or *not* do something. Thus, when I refrain from driving my
car, I manifest my agency not by engaging in an action, but rather by
settling on *not* driving it (See Steward 2012; 2020 for
further defense of the idea of agency as a two-way power).


### 7.3 Intentional Omissions and the Causal Theory of Action



If we accept that omissions are absences, or at least that they are
not events, the possibility of intentional omissions seem to present a
challenge to the causal theory of action. After all, if agency can be
manifested without any events being present, it is difficult to see
how agency can be explained in the terms of the standard story of
action (that is, in terms of the causal history of the bodily
movements that manifest our agency). Hornsby (2004) argues that the
failure of the standard causal theory to account for omissions is
symptomatic of its more general failure to locate the agent in an
account of intentional action that reduces agency to causal
connections between non-agential happenings.



There are at least two ways in which causal theorists try to answer
these charges. One possibility is to argue that even though
intentional omissions are absences, what makes them intentional is
that facts about their causal history are analogous to the facts about
causal history that make "positive actions" instances of
agency (Clarke 2010; 2014). On this view, just as positive actions are
caused by an intention, intentional omissions are cases in which the
non-obtaining of a certain event is similarly explained by an
intention. However, Sartorio (2009) argues that intentional omissions
pose a serious challenge even to this broader understanding of the
standard causal theory of action. Sartorio argues that intentional
omissions are often not best explained by other events (such as the
formation of an intention), but by the *non-occurrence* of
certain events (the best explanation of why I omitted to help my
friend move might be that I *omitted* to form the intention to
help them, rather than that I did form the intention not to help
them). Another strategy to make omissions compatible with the standard
causal theory is to try to show that omissions are events, while
avoiding the questionable view that the omission must be identified
with what the agent intentionally did at the time of the omission
(Payton 2021).


## 8. Animal Action



From the start, our focus has been on the intentional actions of fully
developed rational agents. However, this raises the question: what
about other beings, such as (non-human) animals? Can they act? If so,
do they act in the same way as fully developed humans do? (Similar
questions arise for children and robots, but our focus shall be on the
growing literature on animal agency.)



At first sight, the question may seem uninteresting: Of course,
animals can act! This seems to be a core commitment of our linguistic
practices regarding animals, as we can truthfully assert claims like
the following:



(17)
The cat is stealthily approaching the tree in order to hunt the
bird.
(18)
Canela (a dog) wants you to give her a cookie--that's
why she is following you around.
(19)
The squirrel is digging in the yard because it thinks there are
nuts there.


These sentences seem to attribute to animals the capacity to take
means for remote ends, the capacity to desire objects and act in
pursuit of these desires, and the capacity to employ their thoughts
about their surroundings in the service of such pursuits. Unless we
are skeptics about the folk-psychological concepts involved in these
ascriptions, then, we should hold that animals are agents (but see
Godfrey-Smith 2003, who holds that these folk concepts may be
particularly problematic when applied to animals). It is not
surprising, then, that Aristotle defined animal life in terms of the
capacity for a type of action, movement in place (*DA* 432a),
or that Kant attributes a faculty of desire to all animals, through
which they actualize their representations (KpV9).



Despite all this, even Aristotle hedges on the ascription of action to
animals: although he grants that they are capable of voluntary
(*hekusion*) action (*DMA* 11, 703b2 et passim;
*NE* 3.1, 1111a), he also says that only mature human beings
are capable of action proper (*praxis*) (*NE* 3.1,
1111b). This is because action proper requires the capacity for
deliberation, which animals lack. A modern version of this view is
defended by Stoecker (2009), who argues that agency presupposes the
capacity to act on the basis of "arguments" understood as
grounds on which one might (reasonably) act. Similar reasons for
skepticism about animal agency were influentially advanced by Davidson
(1982; 2003). For, as we saw, Davidson takes it that intentional
action is action for a reason; but acting for a reason requires
possession of beliefs. Yet, Davidson held that ascription of belief
makes sense only to beings who possess the concept of belief, which in
turn requires the capacity for higher-order thought. Since Davidson
assumed that animals possess neither concepts nor the capacity for
higher-order thought, he concluded that animals are not capable of
intentional action. (Davidson, to our knowledge, does not address the
question whether animals are capable of acting simpliciter. However,
he seems committed to saying that animals cannot act at all, given
that he defines actions in terms of intentional actions: for him an
action is an event that is intentional under a certain description,
see Davidson 1971).



We can abstract from these considerations a more general form of
argument for skepticism about animal agency, captured by the following
schema:


1. If *A* acts, *A* must possess features \(F\_1, F\_2,
\ldots , F\_n\). [Presuppositions for Agency Requirement]
2. Animals don't possess \(F\_1, F\_2, \ldots ,
F\_n\). [Presuppositions Animals Lack]
3. Therefore, animals do not act.



This schema is useful as a way to categorize sources of skepticism
about animal agency, and different responses offered in the
literature, depending on which premises are called into question.



A prominent way of criticizing the argument is to call premise 1 into
question. For example, Steward (2009) criticizes Davidson's view
that agency requires the capacity to act for reasons (Premise 1 in
Davidson's argument). Her objection is based on empirical
research suggesting that agency ascriptions are developmentally prior
to propositional attitude ascriptions. She argues that implicit in
these earlier ascriptions is a less demanding account of agency that
presupposes more basic object-directed attitudes (as well as other
capacities, such as subjectivity and agential control). Since animals
possess these features, there is an important sense in which they act.
Other arguments in a similar vein include Dretske's (1999)
argument to the effect that agency presupposes only the capacity for
representing the world (understood, roughly, as a learned response
whose operations are shaped by the environment through experience),
and the idea defended by Korsgaard (2018), Sebo (2017), and Schapiro
(2021) that animals act on the basis of simpler, perceptual-like,
representations.



Other scholars grant the basic links between agency and reasons or
means-ends reasoning but question further presuppositions of the
argument. For example, some scholars grant that actions must be done
for a reason, but hold that (some) animals meet this condition, since
they are capable of having non-conceptual thoughts (Hurley 2003); they
can engage in certain forms of inference in virtue of a non-linguistic
sensitivity to inferential relations; and at least some of them (like
chimpanzees) manifest a distinctive kind of sensitivity to reasons
that doesn't presuppose higher-order thought (Glock 2009; Arruda
and Povinelli 2016). Using a similar strategy, Camp and Shupe (2017)
grant that action presupposes the capacity to distinctively represent
means and ends but argue that the features presupposed by such a
capacity are more minimal than skeptics about animal agency assume:
for example, they may include metacognitive resources that keep track
of a state without representing it as such.



Finally, there are scholars who argue--largely based on empirical
findings--against premise 2 on the grounds that animals possess
the very capacities denied by skeptics of animal agency. For example,
Kaufmann (2015) argues that chimpanzees are capable of a fairly
sophisticated form of planning that meets the constraints of
Bratman's account of planning agency. They are thus capable of
acting, even though they lack conceptual representations. The question
whether some animals (and, if so, which) have beliefs has also been
the subject of debate on the basis of empirical research. While both
early and recent studies appeared to support the Davidsonian view that
animals lack beliefs (Heyes and Dickinson 1990; Marticorena et al.
2011, Horschler, MacLean, and Santos 2020;), later research
complicates the question (de Waal 2016; Krupenye et al. 2016).



Thus far, we have examined ways in which defenders of animal agency
can play defense, by criticizing different parts of the argument for
animal skepticism. When playing offense, defenders of animal agency
commonly appeal to our common ways of speaking and thinking about
animals, which, as noted, provide prima facie good grounds to ascribe
them agency. In addition, it has been noted that the heightened
conditions on agency commonly used to exclude animals would have
counterintuitive effects *for human actions.* After all, many
of our human intentional actions (such as habitual actions) do not
seem to involve higher-order thought, or previous deliberation (a key
insight that leads Hyman 2015 to distinguish different senses of
"acting').



Moreover, several authors grant that full-fledged intentional human
action is special, but argue that we must recognize a more basic form
of agency for animals. (This appears to be the view favoured by
Anscombe (1957), who held that animals could act intentionally,
although not in the language-dependent way that humans could, where we
can draw a significant distinction between the action itself and an
expression of intention. See Gustafsson 2016; Marcus 2021). The need
to recognize a more basic form of agency can be motivated by noting
that otherwise the development of full-fledged human agency becomes
developmentally mysterious, both at the inter- and intra-species
level. Thus, unless we can ascribe agency to non-rational animals, it
will be hard to explain how rational capacities might emerge in humans
at the evolutionary level; and unless we ascribe agency to human
infants, it will be hard to explain how conceptual capacities emerge
(Cussins 1992; MacIntyre 1999; Lovibond 2006; Steward 2009; Fridland
2013).



In light of all these considerations, animal agency skepticism is
nowadays a moribund view, with few defenders. However, even granting
that animals are agents, important questions remain about the nature
of this agency, and its connection to intentional or rational agency.
Indeed, as scholars continue to investigate the topic in an
empirically informed way, we may need to draw further distinctions to
capture the richness of the forms of agency that are manifested across
different species and stages of development in the animal kingdom.