Group items tagged

Donald Davidson

an action

is something an agent does that was ‘intentional under some description,’

there have been many attempts to map the relations between intentions for the future, acting intentionally, and acting with a certain intention.

There has been a notable or notorious debate about whether the agent's reasons in acting are causes of the action

rendered the action intelligible in his eyes

things that merely happen

things they genuinely do

distinction between

the doings, are the acts or actions of the agent

what distinguishes an action from a mere happening or occurrence?

An agent performs activity that is directed at a goal

adopted on the basis of an overall practical assessment of his options and opportunities

awareness

that he is performing the activity

and that the activity is aimed by him at such-and-such a chosen end

It is frequently noted that the agent has some sort of immediate awareness of his physical activity and of the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing.

‘knowledge without observation.’

It is also important to the concept of ‘goal directed action’ that agents normally implement a kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior.

For many years, the most intensely debated topic in the philosophy of action concerned the explanation of intentional actions in terms of the agent's reasons for acting

Davidson and other action theorists defended the position that reason explanations are causal explanations

In the foregoing, reference has been made to explanations of actions in terms of reasons, but recent work on agency has questioned whether contemporary frameworks for the philosophy of action have really articulated the way in which an agent's desires and other pro-attitudes have the distinctive force of reasons in the setting of these ordinary explanations