ABSTRACT
This paper considers Mele’s renewed defense of Davidson’s claim that causalism has an advantage over anti-causalism because the latter is unable to account for the distinction between confabulations or retrospective rationalizations and genuine explanations. The paper takes the form of an imaginary dialogue between a causalist, whose position is loosely modeled on Mele’s, and an anti-causalist (the author). The causalist’s first line of attack is to argue that anti-causalists do not have a criterion to distinguish practical arguments that are genuinely explanatory of an agent’s action from arguments that merely rationalize it. The anti-causalist replies that they are in possession of such a criterion: the reasons which motivate an agent to act may be individuated through the use of counterfactual arguments. While there will be cases which cannot be settled in this way, extreme scenarios should not undermine the robustness of the counterfactual criterion in normal circumstances. The causalist then mounts a second line of attack and argues that anti-causalists treat real people as if they were fictional characters devoid of any inner psychological processes other than the ones which are written in by their author. The anti-causalist replies that the distinction between reasons which are genuinely explanatory of an agent’s action and mere rationalizations is not captured by the contrast between real psychological processes and mere rationalizations. Important as the contrast between real people and fictional characters may be, it cannot be used to motivate a shift to causalism because it has no bearing on the logical form of action explanation.
