5 Action

My arm rises. Is my arm rising something happening to me – say, a movement caused by a muscle spasm or by somebody pulling a string attached to my wrist – or is it my own doing – am I raising my arm? What does it mean to say that I am raising my arm intentionally? Must it be the case that a conscious intention to do so causes my arm to rise? How do I know that I am raising my arm, and does that knowledge differ from the knowledge you may acquire by observing me? The nature of action, action explanation, and agency are central issues in philosophical action theory and have been systematically explored in the last fifty years. On the empirical side, with the emergence of cognitive neuroscience in the 1980s, motor cognition became a very active area of research. Work in the field of motor cognition aims at uncovering and understanding the mechanisms and processes involved in action specification and control. The efforts made to interpret anatomical and physiological evidence using cognitive theories and methods, including computational modeling, and, conversely, to test and refine cognitive models of normal motor cognition using functional neuroimaging and data from brain-damaged patients have resulted in a vast array of exciting discoveries and in provocative hypotheses about the cogni-tive structure of the processes and representations underpinning action. The scientific study of action yields insights, distinctions, as well as descriptions of the causal mechanisms underlying action that go beyond what conceptual analysis, however sophisticated, could alone reveal. Results and ideas drawn from the scientific study of action can thus offer new sources of inspiration for philosophers, evidence which may help overcome longstanding difficulties or redraw the lines on the philosopher's map by challenging certain widely received assumptions. Conversely, careful philosophical analysis can also lead to more sober assessments of over-enthusiastic claims about what some recent empirical data show. In recent years, the integration of philosophical with scientific theorizing has started to yield new insights. This chapter will survey some recent philosophical and empirical work on the nature and structure of action, on conscious agency, and on our knowledge of actions.