Agnes Callard
speaker
832 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2009
last heard Jun 2020
Agnes Callard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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What I'm trying to show is it just doesn't follow from the fact that self one brings self two about, that self one is the causal source of self two.
It doesn't follow from that.
that s1 is authoritative over s2 that s1 sets the rules for s2 that s1 tells what s2 should be like it works that way in the promising case but and it works that way in a lot of cases that are like commitments that are structured like commitments you make a commitment then you have to live up to your past commitment but it doesn't work that way in aspirations
Yeah, so I think that that's right.
And I think that there is something teleological in just ordinary action.
However, that fact, the fact that there's something teleological in ordinary action is famously disturbing to philosophers.
And they've found a way to essentially explain it away.
And that's the causal theory of action.
So Davidson's causal theory of action essentially says, yeah, it's true that...
Say my action of moving towards the store can be assessed in the light of whether or not I get the asparagus at the later time.
But that's only because before I even started moving towards the store, I had a set of mental states, a desire for asparagus and a belief that if I went to the store, I would get asparagus.
And that even prior set of attitudes explains why my getting asparagus is a success condition on what I'm doing when I'm walking.
So essentially, you can just reintroduce a causal component of
So as to kind of more root the standard in the light of which you're assessing the action.
in something that's temporarily prior to the action.
And if you have that kind of approach to action, and I don't, I have no objection to that way of understanding action, at least not in the book, but if you have that approach to action, you're going to be pretty tempted to think that it's only because some bit of behavior is governed by an antecedent representation of both its value and its possibility that
it can be assessed in the light of the corresponding standard.
Yes, that's exactly right.
as
One could tell that story as a story of aspiration, but I don't think Williams intended for it as such.
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