Teleology

The Causalist View

There is an active dispute among philosophers of mind concerning the nature of these different forms of explanation of human action, and the dispute can serve as the dividing wedge between very different views of mind and agency. On the one side are the causalists, who maintain that explanation of action in terms of reasons is a species of causal explanation. Thus, when we say that Kristen went to the kitchen because she wanted a beer, we are saying that Kristen's desire for beer caused her behavior of going to the kitchen. The causal account of action explanation then becomes the cornerstone of broadly reductionist accounts of mind, according to which facts about the mind are ultimately reducible to physical facts.

The causalist position is generally dominant within contemporary philosophy of mind, but it is less obvious than it might appear. For starters, even if we say that the agent went to the kitchen because she wanted beer, this does not by itself imply that the explanation is causal. Other uses of the word because are clearly not causal—for example, “the argument does not work because it equivocates on the key term.” In this example, the point is that we are justified in saying that the argument does not work on the basis of the fact that there is an equivocation; we are not claiming that the equivocation is a cause of invalidity in the way that germs are a cause of disease. So analogously, from the fact that we might say that Kristen went to the kitchen because she wanted a beer, we should not automatically conclude that her desire for beer is being cited as a cause of her behavior, at least not if cause is being used in the normal sense associated with the physical sciences.

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