What are you doing? What am I doing?

Abstract

Psychology ought to describe how and explain why we human beings live our lives as we do, which necessarily comes down to how and why we engage in the actions and have the subjective experiencings that we do. Our physical actions are themselves in part subjective phenomena, because actions are not simply body movements but also essentially involve intentions, beliefs about specific causation, and a sense of voluntariness. Thus, whatever else it is, psychology is inescapably the science of explaining the personally subjective. It is time for psychology to openly embrace its subjective subject-matter as such, which would open up a vast domain still waiting to be systematically studied. The physical actions of persons are not simply self-proclaiming. They often require being skillfully discerned and interpreted and can often be made more or differently meaningful by a somewhat different discernment or interpretation, even sometimes to the actors themselves. This is the fundamental reason that body movement description is insufficient for providing the terms for scientific accounts of how we live and enact our lives, there being in general no satisfactorily objective way, once the nature of what physical actions really are is made clear, to establish just what action or actions have occurred in any sequence of body movements. Whether or not a finger was moved from one position to another, with what velocity it was moved, and similar physical facts may be objectively established, but such facts do not themselves indicate the possible actions -if anywhich thereby have occurred, any more than the mere shape of written words or an audiogram of speech conveys the linguistic meanings of (or the actions implicit in) any particular writing or speech. Such considerations as those of actor-perceived situational contexts and actor’s cultural customs, body movement capabilities, personal experiencings of wants, intentions, beliefs. . .are properly taken into account in the defining \\server05\productn\T\THE\25-2\THE203.txt unknown Seq: 2 13-JUL-06 12:28 258 Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psy. Vol. 25, No. 2, 2005 and interpretation of human actions. This can sometimes be a rather