All actions occur inside the body
IN her recent book Actions (Routledge and Kegan Paul, i980), Jennifer Hornsby develops a theory of action concerning which she admits that '[t]he result is a view about actions that is surprising on the face of it' (p. I; all page references hereafter are to this book). Not least surprising is her avowal that 'I ... claim that all actions occur inside the body. And that summarizes the principal thesis of this essay' (p. 14). My contention in this paper will be that Hornsby's 'surprising' view of actions arises from a serious misconception of the relationship between the notions of action and causation. In order to understand Hornsby's argument for her 'principal thesis', it is necessary first to take note of her (admittedly quite useful) device of employing the subscripts 'T' and 'I' in order to distinguish transitive from intransitive readings of certain verbs like 'move', as illustrated in the sentences 'John moved, his foot' and 'John's foot moved,'. (Other verbs like 'push' and 'pull' are clearly not ambiguous in this way.) The argument may then be summed up in Hornsby's own words as follows: 'Whatever events they are that cause the body to [move,] they presumably occur inside the body ... But movements, cause the body to move,. And actions are movements,. Thus ... all actions ... occur inside the body' (p. i3). (It should be remarked, incidentally, that the actual text contains 'moveT' where I have written '[move,]': this correction seems necessary in order to make sense of Hornsby's' argument.) Now there is one premise of this argument which I shall not question here, although not because I agree with it. This is that '[all] actions are movements,', i.e. that all actions are to be identified with agents' movings, of their bodies (for instance, that, in the famous example discussed by G. E. M. Anscombe in her book Intention, Blackwell, 1957, the pumper's action of movingT his arm is identifiable with his action of poisoning the inhabitants of the house; cf. Hornsby, pp. 6 ff). But while I happen to believe that the criterion of action identity implicit here is mistaken, it doesn't appear to me that Hornsby's view would be any the less 'surprising' if it were restricted only to claiming that all bodily movementsT (e.g. turnings, of eyes and noddings, of heads) 'occur inside the body' (my emphasis), so I shall limit myself to a critique of this narrower claim.