| The problem of the nature of action is to say what else there is to action besides the occurrence of the event brought about in acting. My approach is to distinguish action from non-action on the basis of a special mental cause of the physical event brought about in acting.;I begin with accounts that make do only with reasons, i.e. beliefs and desires, as the mental causes sought. But the belief-desire model of action does not give the necessary condition for action because non-intentional actions are actions done for no reason whatsoever. Sufficiency is ruled out by cases of deviant causality. Intentions do not escape the problems that prevented beliefs and desires from serving as the mark of action. Volitionalist theories of action need to avoid the dilemma posed by Ryle, one horn of which is the infamous problem of a regress of volitions needed to explain volitions. The accounts of volition that evade Ryle's dilemma do so at the cost of leaving the property of being an action as something sui generis and unanalysable.;I isolate a special notion of trying which has as its object only the performing of teleologically basic actions. I argue that an agent has an immediate awareness that he is trying when he is trying. But trying is physical as well as mental. One of the distinctive functions of trying is that of control. It is a deep metaphysical truth about agents as we know them that the control they exercise over the physical actions they perform goes by way of a physical mechanism. To avoid the problem posed by causal deviance, I argue that any causal route from trying to movement is admissible so long as the agent is immediately aware that he is trying when the mechanism is activated and it is this trying that is the cause of the movement. To complete the case for trying being the mark of action when it causes the requisite events, I show that when one performs non-intentional actions, one always tries and the trying is causally related to the events one brings about. |
