Karol Milczarek
University of Warsaw
By analysing one of the main sources of the ‘standard story’ of action–Donald Davidson’s account of practical reasons from his seminal Actions, Reasons and Causes–I argue that psychologism about reasons is faced with major challenge. Contemporary variant of this view, which identifies reasons with propositional attitudes of the agent (paradigmatically, belief-desire pairs), cannot account for some of the necessary features of logical relations, of which action-rationalization is one of–at least as long as, contra Davidson, it takes these attitudes to be naturalistically conceived psychological states. It is so because in order to enter such relations an object has to possess some properties that can only be attributed to psychological states in an elliptical manner. Namely, to fit the role of an answer to Anscombian why-question, an object need to be a contentful entity with a propositional structure (which is necessary to allow for the sensitivity to intensional contexts) that is also apt to be true (in order to account for the factivity of explanation). Unlike mental states as understood by Davidson–as conditions of possibility for meaningful interpretation of agent’s behaviour–propositional attitudes in contemporary psychologism do not possess these properties (even if the propositions that these states are directed towards do), and therefore cannot serve as reasons for actions. This conclusion leaves the advocate of the ‘standard story’ with the following dilemma: either to identify reasons with the considerations about agent’s mental states (e.g., the fact that one believes p and desires q) or to equate them with the considerations provided by such states (e.g., that p and that q). In the last part of the presentation, I argue that since the first horn of the dilemma is implausible, one could accept a version of the latter–but such a view could no longer count as a variant of psychologism.
Chair: Mattia Rossi
Time: 04 September, 10:40 – 11:10
Location: SR 1.003
SOPhiA 2026 