On Hendrickson’s New Argument against the Minimalist Theory of Action Individuation

Abstract

Hendrickson argues that the coarse-grained account of action individuation is unwittingly committed to the metaphysical thesis that all causation is deterministic. I show that the argument does not succeed. On one of the interpretations, all the argument shows is that the minimalists are committed to deterministic causation in a manner of speaking, which is quite compatible with sui generis indeterministic causation. On another, the problem is that minimalism is taken to be committed to a necessary identity claim where the view is only committed to a contingent identity claim. I explore other strategies of saving the argument. In particular, I consider whether the argument will succeed if the designators in question are rigid. I argue that there are principled reasons for thinking that such a strategy must fail. The heyday of the debate on action individuation seems to be over. In fact the debate has satiated philosophical appetites to such an extent that even some participants (notably, Ginet 1990) declared that not much depends on its resolution. Hendrickson (2003) disagrees. He takes the action individuation debate to be significant as it is after all a debate about the nature of action. In his paper, he constructs an interesting novel argument against the coarse-grained theory of action individuation. He argues that the minimalists 1 are unwittingly committed to the metaphysical thesis that all causation is deterministic. Since Hendrickson holds that we should leave room for indeterministic causation, he takes his argument to be a reductio ad absurdum of minimalism. The aim of the paper is to show that Hendrickson’s argument against the coarse-grained account does not succeed. After some conceptual and notational preliminaries (§I) and a brief reminder of the relevant commitments of minimalism (§II), I reconstruct Hendrickson’s argument (§III) and argue that it does not show that minimalism is committed to deterministic causation. Although Hendrickson’s original argument is invalid (see Appendix), it is possible to offer two valid interpretations of the argument. On one of the interpretations (§III.C), all the argument shows is that the minimalist is committed to deterministic causation in a manner of speaking, which is quite compatible with sui generis indeterministic causation. The problem with the other interpretation (§III.B) is that it takes minimalism to be committed to a necessary identity claim where the view is only committed to a contingent identity claim. However, the latter interpretation opens up a possible way of developing Hendrickson’s argument. In §IV, I consider the question whether one could employ the argument against the minimalist if both identity terms are rigid designators, in which case the identity claim would indeed be necessary. I argue, however, that the very set-up of Hendrickson’s argument precludes this sort of response. I. PRELIMINARIES AND NOTATION One of the problems with understanding Hendrickson’s original argument is that he adopts a rather cumbersome notation. In addition, he adopts conventions which he does not always keep. As a result, the argument as it is laid out in his paper is invalid (see Appendix). In what 1 I will refer to the coarse-grained theorists of action individuation also as “minimalists.” Hendrickson understands “fine-grained” accounts quite broadly as encompassing such views as Goldman’s (1970) maximalism as well as moderationism (e.g. Ginet’s 1990; Thalberg 1972 and 1977; Thompson 1977).