Abstract
“Taking the Agent's Point of View Seriously in Action Explanation” takes the ideas adumbrated in Essay 5 a step further and develops a first‐person normative account of action explanation. The paper takes as its starting point a dispute, in the mid‐20th century, between Carl G. Hempel and William Dray, on historical explanation, and builds an agent‐centered account of understanding actions along the lines indicated by Dray. One corollary of the proposed account is that we can understand the actions of only those agents who are “like ourselves” (in Dray's expression) in that they share with us similar principles of rational action. This result is compared with Davidson's thesis concerning radical interpretation to the effect that we can only interpret those subjects with whom we share most of our beliefs.
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