ABSTRACT
This chapter thus tries to sketch what a naturalist approach to the debate around causalism-acausalism looks like. The chapter is in two parts. Section 1 argues that: The debate over reasons as causes cannot be resolved by analyzing concepts and testing them against intuitions and imaginary cases, that the behavior/action distinction is not some fundamental conceptual truth but a distinction of value only where and when cognitive science provides good empirical evidence supporting it, that appeals to reasons as causes are best justified if they fit into empirically well-supported results, that results across the cognitive sciences suggest that much human behavior is best explained by processes that do not look anything like reasons, creating problems for causalists and acausalists alike, that traditional acausal accounts border on mystical metaphysics, and, nonetheless, there is an approach based on work by Dennett and on revealed preference theory in microeconomics that can make sense of a certain kind of acausal story about human action. Section 2 elaborates this story by looking at causalism/acausalism approaches to social entities. The social sciences standardly treat macrolevel entities. Here, a causal story seems highly implausible, for it is hard to see what in the world would count as a group reason that explained the actions of collective entities. My Dennettian, revealed preference approach, however, makes good sense here. We need to ask: Do the choices of such groups make for a consistent utility function? Do these functions allow us to find explanations—real patterns—describing their behavior?
