Solution to the Problem of Action

This section presents a novel attempt to solve to the Problem of Action. This is not intended to convince you that the solution offered is correct, only to provoke further evaluation.

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The Problem of Action is the question,

What distinguishes your actions from things that merely happen to you? (see Philosophical Theories of Action)

The following candidate solution is limited to instrumental actions only. That is, actions which happen in order to bring about outcomes.

Terminology: When an action happens in order to bring about an outcome, it is directed to that outcome. And an outcome to which an action is directed is a goal.

Note that goals are outcomes. For example, the goal of your actions might be to fill Zac’s glass. Goals are therefore not intentions, nor any other kind of mental states.^[1]

For an instrumental action to be initiated, sustaned and brought to a successful conclusion, various problems must be solved. These characteristically include:

• Which outcomes are achievable?
• For each outcome, which means of achieving it are available?
• Of the various means of achieving a given outcome, which best balance cost against well-suitedness?
• Of the achievable outcomes, which best balance cost against expected benefit?
• Having settled on an outcome and means, when should these be maintained and when should they be abandoned?

Up to this point, the notion of ‘directedness’ has been specified in a narrowly schematic way only, by appeal to the idea that an instrumental action happens in order to being an outcome about. What does this amount to?

One answer is this:

For an event to be directed to an outcome is for it to occur because there is one or more outcome in relation to which problems such as those above have been, or appear to have been, solved.

The idea, then, is that we can specify directedness by appeal to problems solving which is characteristic of action.

Note that in specifying directedness, we did not presuppose a notion of action. (The statement above is about an event being directed to an outcome.) This allows us to propose, without circularity, that:

An action is an event that is directed to an outcome.

This is the solution to The Problem of Action.

This solution avoids the objectons to the Standard Solution which were elaborated in The Problem of Action meets Habitual Processes and in Motor Representation and The Problem of Action.

It is an alternative to the two dominant approaches in philosophy of action, those inspired by Davidson (1980) and those inspired by Anscombe (1957). Accepting this novel solution also involves rejecting both the Causal Theory of Action.

(The Causal Theory of Action might work if, necessarily, all actions involved just one kind of process. The fact that there are at least two kinds of process (see Goal-Directed and Habitual Processes) makes pursuing this theory less clearly sensible.)

As there is no published defence of it, and as it involves such a radical departure from the influential views, the above solution to The Problem of Action should be treated as almost certainly incorrect. Useful if it provokes independent critical thinking; not necessary to consider in essays.

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