ABSTRACT
In previous writings, both individually and together, we have defended a view about the nature of reason explanations of human action: We take the position that such explanations are irreducibly teleological rather than causal. Thus, given the view we have proposed concerning action explanation, the long explanatory story will involve both questions about the purposes of individual agents as well as causal effects of those actions, and then further purposes of other agents. It concerns a big mixture of teleological and causal explanation. In this paper, we will say a bit about that view (section 2) and its application to historical explanation, which we will discuss via a couple of examples from World War II (section 3). The teleological account of action explanation is controversial. According to the more orthodox causal theory of action, reason explanations of individual behaviors are a species of causal explanation, invoking the agent’s reasons or intentions or their neural correlates or even facts about what the agents intended as the cause of the behavior (cf. Davidson 1963: 3 and 9; see Mele 2013: 168, on the cautious causalist). In sections 4–5 we will provide an argument against the causal account.
