ARTHUR C.

DANTO

ACTION, KNOWLEDGE, AND REPRESENTATION

And yet they ought to have made some

mention of error at the same time, for error
seems to be more natural to living creatures,
and the soul spends more time in it.
ARISTOTLE, De Anima

In this paper I seek to decompose the concept of basic actions in such a

way that its philosophical components crystallize about one pole, and its
scientific ones about the other. No doubt the scientific components will have
a philosophical importance, but it will differ considerably from the
philosophical importance basic actions themselves were originally believed
to have. The latter derived from the pivotal role basic actions were cast to
play in a massive restructuring of the mind-body relationship along lines
which promised to re-unite bodies with minds and ourselves with both: to
restore to an ontological unity what had been sundered by cartesian
dialysis. That counter-cartesian program I now believe to have failed
definitively, and its collapse, which. I mean to demonstrate, entails the
demolition of the concept of basic actions, at least so far as its hopeful
philosophical significance is concerned. I hasten to mute this dour
assessment, however: Descartes does not survive altogether the
confounding of his rivals, only his distinctions do. But this does not compel
us to follow him in housing the terms of the distinction in logically alien
substances.

Philosophical theories of mind are philosophical theories of body by default.

This is so whether, with Descartes, we radically distinguish properties of
minds and by so doing isolate a class of predicates logically inapplicable to
our bodies just because they are bodies, or whether, in the counter-cartesian
orientation of contemporary philosophy, we psychologize the body and so
isolate a class of predicates logically inapplicable to crass material objects

M. Brand and D. Walton (eds.), Action Theory, 11-25. All Rights Reserved
Copyright <c 1976 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
12 ARTHUR C. DANTO

like sticks and stones, honoring the metaphysical line drawn by Descartes
but locating it elsewhere, employing it to distinguish between orders of
bodies rather than between bodies as an ontologically homogeneous order
which contrasts in a global way with minds, spirits, res cogitans, or the like.
By closing the gap between our minds and our bodies, we open a gap
between our bodies, on the one side, and mere bodies on the other, even if
this gap happens not to generate any of those deep perplexities, e.g., of
causality, which motivated closure of the original gap: no special causal
concept differentiates the way the hand moves the stick from the way the
stick moves the stone. The only remaining problem, perhaps, concerns the
way we move the hand. Suppose we speak of such movings as actions,
perhaps as basic actions: then one consequence of treating our bodies as
already having the properties cartesians relegated to minds, is that we are
absolved from having to think that such movements of the hand are distinct
effects of some special mental cause, acting mysteriously across what ought
to be the metaphysically intraversable space between spirit and matter. The
basic action, by filling this space, absorbs as its own the philosophical
boundaries of the space and emerges as what the earlier philosophy of mind
and body would have had to regard as a metaphysical monster, mental and
crass at once, one thing, indissolubly compacted of thought and matter, and
the world now seen as constituted of two sorts of bodies, unhaunted by
asomatic ghosts. It is this dualism, enshrined, for example, in Strawson's
distinction between entities exhaustively describable by sets of M-predicates
alone, and entities only partially describable by these but fully describable if
we augment our basic vocabulary to compass P-predicates (there being no
entity exhaustively describable by P-predicates alone) which the new
concept of action appears to have made feasible, and which explains in
some measure the importance spontaneously felt to attach to the concept of
action. It is not just that philosophers had hit upon an oddly neglected
subject on which fresh work might be done, but that actions were suddenly
felt to hold a metaphysical promise not appreciated from the limited
contexts of law and morality in which they had traditionally been examined.
The study of action must be considered as part of a general movement to
rethink the philosophy of bodies, paralleling in Anglo-Saxon philosophy the
deep reassessment of the body undertaken on the Continent by Sartre and
others, and especially by Merleau-Ponty, a common, single philosophical
enterprise, whatever may have been the differences in philosophical style
and points of departure. It was Merleau's view, for example, that an exact
understanding of the structures of the phenomenal field revealed features
which only could be explained with reference to the body, which must itself