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10.4324/9780415249126-V001-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-V001-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/action/v-1

1. Actions, events and individuation

‘Action’ and ‘act’ are often used interchangeably. But ‘action’ is given a definite meaning when actions are taken to be a species of events: it denotes particulars of a certain sort – concrete items in the spatiotemporal world. It is useful then to give a different meaning to ‘act’: acts are things people do (which are sometimes called act-types). Such things are not particulars, since one person can do the same thing as another. If Mary and John both voted for Smith, for instance, then Mary’s act (voting for Smith) was the same as John’s; but obviously the event that was Mary’s voting for Smith was not the same action as John’s voting for Smith.

Is Mary’s voting for Smith ever the same action as Mary’s doing some other act? This is a question now about the individuation of actions. Proponents of a fine-grained account (for example Goldman 1970) say that there are as many actions as there are acts exemplified by the agent on occasion, so that, in our pilot example, the man’s depressing of the lever is one action and his shutting down of the engines is another action. Proponents of a coarse-grained account, on the other hand (for example Davidson 1971), assert the identity of his depressing of the lever with his closing down of the engine. They think that actions are often described in terms of their effects. When the description ‘Paul’s depressing of the lever’ is used, an event is seen to have resulted in the lever’s being depressed; when ‘Paul’s shutting down the engines’ is used, an event is seen to have resulted in the engines’ shutting down. But if Paul shut down the engines by depressing the lever, then the lever’s coming to be down in its turn caused the engines’ cutting out, so that in fact an action of Paul’s is spoken of twice over here: it is described now in terms of one effect, now in terms of another.

This coarse-grained account can be made plausible by thinking of Paul’s part in the engines’ coming to be shut down as his moving of his arm. The thought is that for the engines to shut down, nothing was required of Paul after his arm had moved. Since he is the only relevant agent, Paul’s moving his arm is the only action that there is, and ‘his moving of his arm’ is just one of its descriptions.

Various objections are made to the coarse-grained account, and these have led some philosophers (for example Ginet 1990) to intermediate accounts of actions’ individuation. (An intermediate account might have it that Paul’s moving his arm is the same as his moving his arm against the lever (which would be denied by the fine-grained theorist), but is different from his shutting down of the engines (which would be denied by the coarse-grained theorist).) One objection to the coarse-grained account would say about Paul’s case that his shutting down of the engines (s) took place later than his moving his arm (m), so that these have different properties: m occurred at t, s at t + n, so that ms. A proponent of the coarse-grained account of course maintains that s really did occur at t if m did. They claim that our tendency to suppose otherwise is explained by our confusing s with the effect in terms of which we think of it. (The engines’ shutting down is an effect which indeed occurred later than the action, they say.) A related objection relies on intuitions about when tensed sentences such as ‘He has shut down the engines’ are first true. Here the coarse-grained account’s proponent allows the relevant intuition: this sentence is not true until some time later than ‘He has moved his arm’ is first true. But, they say, the truth of ‘He has shut down the engines’ requires more than the past occurrence of the event s: it also requires the past occurrence of the engines’ shutting down.

The coarse-grained account joins with a definition of ‘an action’ as ‘someone’s intentionally doing something’ to give intuitively right results. Suppose that Paul’s shutting down of the engines was a terrible mistake, and that he was responsible for an accident. We understand how we can think of Paul as an agent in respect of something he did quite unintentionally, when we appreciate that his doing one thing was (the same as) his doing another. One thing he did was to shut down the engines, and he did this accidentally; but his doing this was his depressing of the lever, and depressing the lever was something that he did intentionally. For an event actually to have been an action of some person’s according to the definition, it has to be true only that at least one of the things they did was something they intentionally did.

This criterion of actionhood is sometimes put by saying that an action has to be ‘intentional under one of its descriptions’. ‘Under a description’ has wide philosophical currency. But it can be misleading. When ‘doing things under descriptions’ is employed, it is made to seem as if there were these things people do, and that they have various descriptions. Things people do do not have various descriptions, however: people’s actions have various descriptions, and these descriptions correspond one:one with the things, or acts, that they then do.

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Citing this article:
Hornsby, Jennifer. Actions, events and individuation. Action, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-V001-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/action/v-1/sections/actions-events-and-individuation.
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