Are scientific discoveries relevant?

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Donald Davidson asks, ‘What is the mark that distinguishes ... actions?’ Are scientific discoveries relevant to answering this question?

What is the mark that distinguishes actions?

How are non-accidental matches between intentions and motor representations possible?

philosophical
methods

informally observing,

guessing (‘intuition’),

imagining counterfactual situations
(‘thought experiments’),

reasoning,

& pursuing theoretical elegance

First, think about the methods philosophers use. Am I missing any?

Next, think about how philosophers construct theories of action ...

Here’s Ayesha and she’s about to act, which involves some kind of processes occurring in her imnd.

Ben want’s to predict Ayesha’s action, perhaps so he can coordinate his actions around hers. He is therefore having a think about what Ayesha might be up to.

Implicit in Ben’s thinking is a model of actions.

And along comes the philosopher and attempts to guess what is going on in Ben’s mind when he is thinking about Ayesha. The philosopher asks, in effect, What model of actions is implicit in Ben’s thinking?

And this, essentially, is the raw material for philosophical theories of actions.

Focus on Ben for a moment.

What mundane purposes does thinking about actions serve? \begin{itemize} \item prediction and coordination \item ethical (assigning responsibility, blame; living together) \item normative (how actions should be) \item regulative (he wants himself and others to live it out as much as to describe how things are) \end{itemize} Insofar as thinking about actions enables making predictions, how accurate would we expect it to be?

So it’s not all about accuracy; in fact, of these, only prediction and coordination even potentially requires that his model of actions is accurate.

Functions of Ben’s model of minds and actions:

ethical
normative
regulative
predictive
Second, consider Ben’s concern with making predictions.
--- speed vs accuracy
Whenever you are making predictions about anything at all, you face a \textbf{trade-off between accuracy and speed}. Making more accurate predictions requires considering more information and integrating it in a more complex model of minds and actions. By contrast, making faster predictions requires narrowing the information you consider and using a less complex model of minds and actions. Since an observer often has to make predictions fast enough to actually coordinate her actions with another agent’s, and since making predictions consumes scarce cognitive resources, the observer usually needs to trade accuracy for speed.
Because making predictions involves a trade-off between speed and accuracy, we should not expect mundane thinking about actions to be especially accurate.
So Ben’s model of minds and actions is not built for accuracy.

So this is the model of minds and actions on which many philosophical theories are based ... they are cast as attempts to characterise this model.

Maybe philosophers are not interested in the mark of action but in how people think of action. How do people ordinarily make the distinction between actions and other events in an agent’s life? Perhaps in myriad ways. But if philosophers were really interested in this, they’d be using the methods of social psychology. Which they are not.

Relying on philosophers to characterise actions
would be like
relying on Aristotelians to characterise physical objects.

In the case of physical objects, I suppose few people seriously think there is much we can understand without appeal to physics.

As Newton stressed, contemporary philosophical methods are not well suited to the task. Contemporary philosophical methods are of limited use in making discoveries about the world.

Donald Davidson asks, ‘What is the mark that distinguishes ... actions?’ Are scientific discoveries relevant to answering this question?

What is the mark that distinguishes actions?

How are non-accidental matches between intentions and motor representations possible?

So I was asking whether scientific discoveries are relevant ot answering Davidson’s question, ‘What is the mark that distinguishes ... actions?’

My conclusion is that PHILOSOPHICAL THEORIES ARE NOT LIKELY TO BE RELEVANT to answering the question. Because philosophical methods are of limited use in making discoveries about the world.

Ultimately, the scientific discoveries are our only hope.

So why would philosophers think about Davidson’s question at all? One thing philosophical methods are ideally suited to is identifying limits on scientific theories and asking questions. Not knowing things is what philosophers are best at.

This brings me to my next question ...

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Are scientific discoveries relevant?

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