Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

188 Notes
48. Audi, Practical Reasoning, 99.
49. Ibid., 42.
50. Bishop, Natural Agency, 109; Davidson, “How is Weakness of Will Possible?”
41.
51. Bennett, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” 127–29.
52. Ibid., 125–27.
53. As von Wright puts it (Explanation and Understanding, 113), “verbal behavior
does not in principle afford more direct access to the inner states [of an
agent] that any other (intentional) behavior.”
54. The fact that we often engage in intentional explanations of our own behaviour
has been highlighted by von Wright (Explanation and Understanding,
114) and Dennett (Intentional Stance, 91).
55. Von Wright, Explanation and Understanding, 113.
56. I understand the character of the agent to be a product of her habitual pro
attitudes along with the strength or weakness of will that she regularly displays.
57. Schueler, Reasons and Purposes, 69–87.
58. At least some of those who reject Davidson’s causal thesis do so because they
assume that there can be no causal explanation that does not cite causal laws
(Thalberg and Levison, “Are There Non-Causal Explanations of Action?,”
84). It is this view that I am about to reject.
59. Psillos, Causation and Explanation, 233.
60. Of course, if a person intends to rob the bank, he will normally do the same
thing. There are often, if not always, a number of intentions which could give
rise to the same action. So our identifi cation of the cause on the basis of the
action must be provisional, subject to further verifi cation. This is, of course,
the problem of abduction (6.2.1), the fact that on its own abductive reasoning
looks like the fallacy of affi rming the consequent.
61. Let me offer an example. Danto (Narration and Knowledge, 221) argues
that we can subsume the behaviour of the inhabitants of Monaco—putting
out American fl ags on the occasion of their national holiday—by citing a
law, namely “whenever a nation has a sovereign of a different national origin
than its own citizens, those citizens will, on the appropriate occasions,
honour that sovereign in some acceptable fashion.” But as Michael Scriven
asks (Olafson, “Narrative History,” 272 n. 12), when have the inhabitants of
England shown any tendency to honour the Greek origin of Prince Philip?
62. For a defence of the reliability of such predictions, see Ran Lahav’s “The
Amazing Predictive Power of Folk Psychology.”
63. This is my interpretation of Davidson’s position, although I think it is a
defensible one. My proposition (1) corresponds to Davidson’s “principle of
the nomological character of causality” (“where there is causality, there must
be a law”); my proposition (2) is an application of Davidson’s principle of
the “anomalism of the mental” (“there are no strict deterministic laws on
the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained”); and my
proposition (3) is an application of Davidson’s “principle of causal interaction”
(“at least some mental events interact causally with physical events”).
See Davidson, “Mental Events,” 208.
64. Davidson, “Causal Relations,” 159–60.
65. Davidson, “Causal Relations,” 160; “Mental Events,” 215–23.
66. Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” 17.
67. Hutto, “Davidson’s Identity Crisis,” 47–49.
68. Dyke, Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy, 7–8.
69. Davidson, “Mental Events,” 217.
70. Sober, “Testability,” Sect. 1.