Sentence examples for explanations of action from inspiring English sources

One of the principal arguments that was used to show that reason explanations of action could not be causal was the following.

In his 2000, pp. 164 171, Dancy considers similarly conciliatory thoughts but insists that, on his view, while there may be scope for causal explanations of action, "they cannot include psychologistic ones except in other than a reason-specifying style".

Of course not all explanations of action proceed by reference to an agent's reasons at all.[1] Perhaps you speak angrily to me because you are stressed and sleep-deprived.

As a consequence, commonsense psychology is not strictly reducible to the neural sciences, and this means that reason explanations of action and corresponding neural explanations are, in the intended sense, 'independent' of one another.

To get a sense of how wide the range of options is, notice the following startling possibility: that what intuitively seem to be mistakes could turn out to be reasons, because they figure into satisfactory theoretical explanations of action.

Most causalists will allow that reason explanations of action are teleological but contend that teleological explanations in terms of goals — purposive explanations in other words — are themselves analyzable as causal explanations in which the agent's primary reason(s) for Fing are specified as guiding causes of the act of Fing.

Although the account of rationality within economics differs in some ways from the folk psychology people tacitly invoke in everyday explanations of actions, many of the same questions carry over (Rosenberg 1976, ch. 5; 1980, Hausman 2011).

There has been a notable or notorious debate about whether the agent's reasons in acting are causes of the action — a longstanding debate about the character of our common sense explanations of actions.

Davidson responds by arguing that citing only the physical properties of the cause to provide a sufficient explanation of an action does not address the particular interests that psychological explanations of actions serve providing the reasons of the agent in light of which she performed the action that she did.

Assuming Hume's maxim that if an event E causes an event E′, then E and E′ must be wholly distinct, McLaughlin maintains that purposive explanations of actions are constitutive and not causal in character.

According to situationism, empirical research shows that commonsense explanations of actions in terms of character traits (such as honesty, kindness, or courage) are systematically mistaken or inaccurate, because this research shows that the actions in question are better explained in terms of situational features (Ross and Nisbett 1991; Harman 1999; Doris 2002).