Donald Davidson by Glüer Kathrin;

Author:Glüer, Kathrin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

4.2 Reasons are Causes

According to Davidson, two different relations are required to account for the full force of (true) reasons explanations: a logical relation and a causal relation. These relations, however, obtain on different levels or, more precisely, they take different kinds of relata. In general, logical relations hold between propositions or interpreted sentences. The logical relation we are concerned with here—between reasons and actions—thus must be understood as holding between the propositions or contents that are the agent’s reasons and his action as described, or conceptualized, a certain way.3

Causal relations, on the other hand, Davidson construes as holding directly between events, independently of how these events are described or conceptualized. According to Davidson, such causal relations obtain between the beliefs and desires of an agent and her actions. And there is nothing special about these causal relations; what we are dealing with is ‘common and garden’ causality between ordinary events in the world. Speaking of reasons, of beliefs, desires, and action is, according to Davidson, simply a particular way of describing certain of these ordinary events. Actions, for instance, are events that can also be described as bodily movements. Categorizing such a movement as, for instance, eating a piece of chocolate amounts to subsuming it under a particular type: a type of action. Correspondingly, beliefs and desires, or rather their formation, can be construed as mental events. The relevant causal relation then is supposed to hold directly between event tokens—irrespective of how these events are typed, that is, described or conceptualized. This distinction between ‘event tokens’ and their descriptions provides the key to the Davidsonian attempt at reconciling the two modes of explanation that otherwise might appear incompatible: reasons explanation and causal explanation. To see that they can be reconciled, Davidson submits, we need to understand that one of them holds on the level of description while the other holds between description independent events. In what follows, we shall have a closer look at both levels, starting with the descriptions.

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