ABSTRACT
The paradoxes that arise from treating an attitude's being taken to a proposition as a property of an event referred to by some description in a sentence expressing it are the problems about the relation of choice to action are those on which Fregean semantics bears most directly. A working hypothesis of this investigation is that actions are events explained by their doers' choices, bodily actions being events in their bodies, mental ones events in their minds. John Searle has shown not only that a problem confronts that hypothesis, which, although at first sight merely technical, turns out to be deep, but also that its solution enables to solve a further problem – the problem of so-called deviant causal chains – which many have believed to be fatal. A choice self-referentially explains an action only if it is a choice that the bodily or mental event constituting that action both occur and be explained by that choice.
