Essays on Actions and Events

Davidson argues that a primary reason for an action—a pair of a pro-attitude and a belief—is the cause of that action, not merely a logical or justificatory accompaniment. This directly rejects the Rylean and Wittgensteinian orthodoxy that reasons and causes belong to distinct logical categories, and that explaining an action by citing reasons excludes causal explanation. Davidson concedes that the connection between a reason and the action it rationalizes is conceptual rather than empirical, but insists this does not preclude causation; it only shows that the relevant causal law is not a strict one. The essay, first published in 1963, is widely credited with redirecting the philosophy of action toward causal theories .

Anomalous monism is the framework introduced in 'Mental Events' (1970) and elaborated across the volume. It combines three theses: mental events causally interact with physical events; causation requires a covering law; but there are no strict psychophysical laws. The resolution is that mental events are token-identical with physical events—so they can enter causal relations—while mental descriptions remain irreducible because the constitutive norms of rationality that govern mental ascription preclude the exceptionless generalizations required for lawlike reduction. The position has been the reference point for debates about mental causation, supervenience, and non-reductive physicalism ever since, with critics such as Jaegwon Kim arguing that it renders the mental epiphenomenal.

In 'The Individuation of Events' and related essays, Davidson argues that events are concrete particulars, not repeatable universals or proposition-like entities, and that they are individuated by their causes and effects. Two events are identical if and only if they have exactly the same causes and effects. This contrasts with Quine's more deflationary treatment of events as the content of sentences, and Davidson explicitly addresses Quine in the appendix added to the second edition, 'Reply to Quine on Events.' The stakes for action theory are direct: if actions are events, and events are individuated causally, then describing an action under one aspect (as a bodily movement) and under another (as an intentional act) does not yield two events but one event under two descriptions—a move essential to reconciling causation with intentionality.

The 2001 edition adds two appendices, 'Adverbs of Action' (1985) and 'Reply to Quine on Events' (1985), both previously published elsewhere . 'Adverbs of Action' extends the event-based treatment of action sentences to adverbial modification, defending the view that adverbs are predicates of events rather than operators on sentences. 'Reply to Quine on Events' responds directly to Quine's skepticism about Davidson's event ontology. Neither appendix alters the core arguments of the original essays, but together they register a decade and a half of subsequent debate and clarify Davidson's commitment to events as genuine particulars. The pagination and introduction remain from the first edition, with the new material appended rather than integrated.

Jaegwon Kim's objection is the most cited: if mental events are identical with physical events, and all causation is underwritten by strict physical laws, then mental properties appear to do no causal work. The physical event causes its effects in virtue of its physical properties; its mental properties are causally inert. Davidson's appeal to supervenience—mental properties depend on physical properties without being reducible to them—does not, on Kim's account, restore causal efficacy to the mental. Davidson responded in later essays that the demand for a property-level causal role misconstrues the nature of causal explanation, but the exchange remains unresolved and is the standard entry point for students encountering the position.

Anomalism is a principled claim, not a confession of current ignorance. Davidson holds that there cannot be strict psychophysical laws connecting mental and physical descriptions, because the mental vocabulary is governed by the constitutive ideal of rationality—we ascribe beliefs and desires only to creatures whose attitudes are largely coherent—while physical vocabulary is governed by the demands of a closed, law-governed system. These two frameworks cannot be unified into a single nomological system without abandoning the normative dimension essential to mental ascription. The 'anomaly' is thus a feature of the mental as such, not a gap awaiting future science, which is why Davidson describes anomalism as a necessary condition for viewing action as autonomous.