Actions are not Events

Abstract

A common prejudice in action theory is that actions are events. Virtually no defence of this view is to be found, and hardly anyone has even considered an alternative. On all sides of the debate on individuation of action, it is innocently presupposed that actions are events, as in the context of arguments regarding times, places, and causes of actions. What I propose is that actions are not events but instances of a certain relation, the relation of bringing about (or making happen), whose terms are agents and events. There is, in fact, nothing new about this view, which was proposed both by von Wright and by Chisholrn' long before individuation became a hotly debated issue. Because of the present impasse in that debate, this view needs to be reconsidered. Three qualifications must be made about the relational view. First, to view actions as bringings about does not require accepting Chisholm's controversial Agency Theory, on which bringing about is an irreducible relation between agents and events. For even if we opt, as I do,2 for some version of the Causal Theory of action, on which the relation essential to action is analysed in terms of a causal relation betveen events, we are not thereby committed to the view that actions are events. Second, we must not confuse the relevant sense of 'action', the sense in which a bringing about is an action, with the sense (if it is a genuine sense of 'action') in which the event brought about is an action. Suppose that Wilbur bends the spoke of a bicycle wheel. Our question is not whether the spoke's bending is an event-we may grant that3-but whether Wilbur's bending of the spoke is an event.4 Notice that 'the bending of the spoke' is ambiguous between these intransitive and transitive readings. The gerundive forms of a great many action verbs are ambiguous in this way, e.g., 'opening', 'heating', and 'arousing', and taken intransitively surely they do designate events. 'Movement' (as in 'bodily movement')