Causing Actions (review)

This book is a contribution to the philosophy of language. Contrary to what some might infer from its title, Pietroski’s book deals neither with the lexical or grammatical expression of causativity in any particular language nor with any sort of causative constructions, causal prepositions/adverbials, or other specific morphosyntactic relations. A proponent of event dualism, P is concerned here with demonstrating the thesis that ‘causation is the extensionalization of explanation; and mental explanations do not presuppose neuralism’ (236).

Causing actions is divided into a preface, an introduction, seven numbered chapters, and a postscript-like final chapter labeled an ‘appendix’ (‘The semantic wages of neuralism’, 246–59). The opening paragraph of the preface provides the primary consideration motivating this book: ‘Reasons are causes, and reasons do not have arational descriptions. Yet how can this be so, given that reasons often have effects—like bodily motions—whose occurrence can be explained in arational terms?’ (vii).

P sees his task as consisting in a philosophical account of mental causation that provides ‘a sufficient condition for being a mental cause of bodily motion, such that this condition helps us see how bodily motions have both mental and neural causes’; he thus proposes an account that ‘combines event dualism and a conception of causation as the transitive extensionalization of explanation’ (17).

In Ch. 1, ‘Actions as inner causes’ (18–54), P makes the grammatically relevant claim that ‘there are many ways to be an Agent’; it is therefore unnecessary to ascribe different logical forms to a proposition of the type ‘X broke_T the window’ because of the possibility of assigning different thematic roles to the subject of such a sentence (53). In Ch. 2, ‘Fregean innocence’ (55–88), P discusses German philosopher Gottlob Frege’s principle that ‘every meaningful linguistic expression has a semantic value (Bedeutung) and a sense (Sinn)’ (55; ‘Sense and reference’, Translations from the philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege, trans. by P. Geach and M. Black, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 [1892]).

In Ch. 3, ‘From explanation to causation’ (89–116), P offers the following thesis on the relation between causation and explanation: ‘event C caused event E if a true thought about C [. . .] explains a true thought about E, where true thoughts—the senses of true sentences—are facts’ (89). In Ch. 4, ‘Other things being equal’ (117–46), he sets forth his view on the necessity and function of ceteris paribus laws.

Ch. 5, ‘Personal dualism’ (147–78), is devoted to a rejection of Cartesian dualism and seeks to explain how persons can have both minds and bodies (163); in this connection, P argues that ‘mental events have spatial location’ (169). In Ch. 6, ‘Modal concerns’ (179–215), P argues that ‘bodily motions can have neural and (distinct) mental causes without being objectionably overdetermined’ (179).

In Ch. 7, ‘Natural causes’ (216–45), P returns to, among other things, a grammatically relevant issue raised in Ch. 1 (see above): ‘A rock is the Agent of a breaking_I if it is the most actor-like participant in an event that causes the breaking_I’ (224). The appendix serves as a final critique and ultimate rejection of neuralism.