What distinguishes Action from its peers?
In short, he's a profound sentimentalist who doesn't distinguish action from feeling, power from passion, but finds the weight of the world and the motor of humanity in the power of passion itself.
Dray argued that Hempel failed to see that what distinguishes action from event explanations is the nature of the connection between the explanans and the explanandum.
Some have arisen in response to Johnson's challenging emphasis on the obvious rightness of a non-virtuous agent's attempting self-improvement (Johnson 2003; van Zyl 2009), some in response to the obvious relevance of motive to the moral worth of actions (Slote 2001), some aiming to distinguish action guidance from a theoretical account of what makes actions right (Swanton 2003; Zagzebski 2004).
The critic may object that a person may act as if p were true without believing p. However, it is not clear that this advice to distinguish action on the basis of p and belief that p can always be followed.
In Charophycean green algae (e.g. Chara and Nitella) and higher plants (Embryophyceae), fundamental features distinguish action potentials characterised from those in animals, including slow kinetics [4] [6] and the voltage activated ionic conductances that underpin excitability [7].
The advantage of this framework is that it allows for incorporating the effects of context in reactive and proactive control into a single unifying parameter, while distinguishing action cancellation from no-go decisions.
Elsewhere, Dreyfus (1991) distinguishes actions that are logically and physically possible from the smaller subset of actions that are existentially possible in a specific situation – one's so-called "live options" (p. 190).
(i) an ability to imitate, (ii) mutual awareness of shared attention when two or more agents are focused on the same salient object, and (iii) an inherent ability to distinguish actions from objects.
One way to approach the issues here is to ask what distinguishes actions of individuals that together constitute shared activity from those that amount to a mere aggregation of individual acts.
