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Accordingly, desires are reasons because they (potentially) explain action, and they explain action because (it is supposed) they causally explain it.
Mental events and states explain action by making it intelligible rational in light of the agent's beliefs and purposes.
But Davidson took his reasons to "rationalize" or justify as well as to explain action, and many philosophers subsequently concluded that the two kinds of reasons had to be closely, conceptually, connected.
On the other hand, the literature on neural excitability (see, e.g. [5]) clearly uses slow fast decomposition to explain action potential generation for tonic spiking models, although the accompanying bifurcation analysis of such a system often ignores or just inconsequently uses the given slow/fast structure.
(The presumption that desires or more generally motivations explain action is plausibly a legacy of a theory of practical reasoning on which desires are reasons for actions — and therefore, it is concluded, their causes — but that theory is off-limits to Velleman's project, and should not be appealed to by it, however indirectly).
In a seminal paper of 1978, Premack and Woodruff posed the question of whether chimpanzees have a 'theory of mind'; that is, do they attribute mental states to others, and do they, like adult humans, predict and explain action on the basis of hypotheses about these states.
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On the other, Muslims were always having to explain actions that had nothing to do with them.
The former are reasons we appeal to in attempting to explain actions and attitudes.
It is intended to tell against non-causal theories of action, which deny that reasons explain actions by causing them.
Indeed, he argues that reasons explain actions just inasmuch as they are the causes of those actions.
Mental descriptions explain actions by rationalizing them making them intelligible in light of the agent's beliefs and purposes.
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