Thursday, March 28, 2019

Peter Railton, Distinguished University Professor and John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan
Friday, March 28, 2019
3:30 pm, University Club,Conference Room A
 

Explaining Actions

Wesley Salmon developed and defended a causal theory of explanation in the natural sciences, emphasizing the role of elucidating underlying processes. He was unsure, however, whether this theory could be extended to psychology. In this he was hardly alone, and attempts to build a causal theory of action have encountered a host of difficulties. I will be arguing that one source of these difficulties has been an insufficiently rich understanding of the components of action, and especially of the nature of beliefs and desires. A philosophically and empirically more adequate account of belief and desire can, I will argue, revive the prospects for a theory of the explanation of action in terms of causal processes.