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Conventional aspects of human action, its time, and its place

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Hector-Neri Castañeda
Hector-Neri Castañeda
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

In the last few years a broad debate has taken place in books and journals about the time of action. Many different views have been propounded, and many an ingenious argument has been devised. I submit that those views are insightful but that the arguments have been misplaced. The views are at bottom compatible, for they differ in what they call ‘action’. I propose that our conception of action is so enveloped in conventions that there is no factual issue, per se, about the time and place of human action. There are actually several layers of conventionality involved in our timing and placing of actions. The crucial philosophical issues pertain to the clarification of those conventional layers. Among these issues are: (i) What are the conventions involved in timing and locating actions? (ii) What is the rationale for those conventions? (iii) Is that rationale sufficient to show the usefulness of those conventions? (iv) Can and should those conventions be improved upon?

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 1980 , pp. 436 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1980

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References

Notes

1 The contrast I am drawing here between the universe of science and the world of experience is related, in fact, to Sellars' contrast between the Scientific Image of the World and the Manifest Image of the World. It appears fully in the existentialist schools with their concentration on the categories of the human existence of man in the world.

2 Most of the seven conventions on the meaning of ‘action’ that we discuss here are at least implicitly presupposed in the following papers: Bennett, Jonathan, “Shooting, Killing, and Dying,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1973):315–323.CrossRefGoogle ScholarDavidson, Donald, “Eternal vs. Ephemeral Events,” Noûs 5 (1971):333–349.CrossRefGoogle ScholarDavis, Lawrence, “Individuation of Actions,” The Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970):520–530.CrossRefGoogle ScholarMartin, R.M., “Facts: What They Are and What They Are Not,” American Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1967):269–280.Google ScholarThomson, Judith Jarvis, “The Time of a Killing,” The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971):115–132.CrossRefGoogle ScholarVollrath, John, “When Actions Are Causes,” Philosophical Studies 27 (1975): 339.CrossRefGoogle ScholarWeil, Vivian, and Thalberg, Irving, “The Elements of Basic Action,” Philosophia 4 (1974):111–138.CrossRefGoogle ScholarWoods, John, Engineered Death (Ottawa: The University of Ottawa Press, 1978).Google Scholar

3 For additional dimensions of conventionality in action see Castaneda, Hector-Neri, Thinking and Doing (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1975CrossRefGoogle Scholar), chapter 12.

4 I am very grateful to Christopher Maloney for having improved the grammar and the style of the first version of this paper in March, 1977.1 am also grateful to Donald Algeo for some helpful discussion and some useful examples concerning the timing of actions.