In his treatment of the Wittgensteinian paradox about rule-following, Saul Kripke represents the non-reductionist approach, according to which meaning something by an expression is a sui generis state that cannot be elucidated in more basic terms, as brushing philosophical questions under the rug. This representation of non-reductionism aligns with the conception of some of its proponents. Meaning is viewed by these philosophers as an explanatory primitive that provides the basic materials for philosophical inquiry, and whose nature cannot serve as an object for that inquiry. There is, however, an alternative way of conceiving of non-reductionism, which makes it possible to tackle philosophical questions about the nature of meaning head-on, and thus to respond to Kripke’s challenge in an illuminating manner.

This chapter assesses the merits of Aquinas’s hylomorphic account of the human act by comparing it to three contemporary action theories: (1) Donald Davidson’s causal theory of action, (2) Jennifer Hornsby’s agent-causal account, and (3) John Searle’s component analysis. It argues that Aquinas’s account has several advantages over these theories. First, it does not fall prey to the problem of deviant causal chains, which besets Davidson’s theory. Nor does it fall victim to the problem of the disappearing agent, which besets Davidson’s as well as Searle’s theory. Finally, Aquinas’s theory also has an advantage over Hornsby’s account. On Hornsby’s picture, a bodily human act is a causing that occurs inside the body, which has the counterintuitive consequence that human acts are unobservable, on her view. The chapter argues that for Aquinas only one component of a bodily human act is unobservable, namely, the volition, while the bodily commanded act is open to our gaze. Despite these advantages, it argues that Aquinas’s theory also has a drawback, namely, the dualism on which it is predicated. But it suggests that his hylomorphic theory of the human act can be detached from his dualism.

In this chapter, I articulate and defend several views that play important roles throughout the remainder of the book. First, I articulate the task of a metaphysical theory of action as that of providing an account of the distinction between actions and mere behaviours. I then distinguish two things we might mean to talk about when we talk about someone’s actions: the things they do; and their particular doings of those things. I argue that we are ontologically committed to entities of both types, and defend my preferred ontology, according to which particular doings are events, while the things we do are a kind of property we possess.

In this chapter, I introduce the topic of negative action. I provide a rough account of the distinction between positive and negative actions, of the distinction between two commonly-discussed kinds of negative behaviour (omitting and refraining), and of what distinguishes negative actions from mere failures to do something. Then, drawing on this discussion and the discussion of Chapter 1, I articulate the problem of negative action: negative actions seem to be genuine actions; actions seem to be events; but (at least some) negative actions seem to be, not events, but absences thereof. I trace the widespread acceptance of the latter claim to Deflationism, the view – often held only implicitly – that negative action sentences express negative existentials.

In this chapter, I provide two positive arguments in favour of my sophisticated Neo-Davidsonian treatment of negative action sentences and against the Deflationist alternative. I argue that my view can accommodate a range of data about the behaviour of adverbs in negative action sentences and their interaction with perceptual locutions, which Deflationism can’t. Thus, we can solve the problem of negative action by rejecting Deflationism, and with it the thought that (at least some) negative actions aren’t events. Instead, we should claim that negative actions are simply events which play the ensuring role. I close by comparing my view to two recent alternatives.

In this chapter, I begin to develop my metaphysics of negative actions in more detail. I articulate a realizer-functionalist theory of negative actions: negative actions are events which play the ensuring role; ordinary, ‘positive’ events play this role; therefore, negative actions are identical to these ordinary, ‘positive’ events; we needn’t posit metaphysically negative entities such as absences. I show that this theory is prima facie incompatible with the popular property-exemplification theory of events, and that the latter theory fits better with a view in which negative actions are realized by positive events, but not identical to them. I articulate and defend a version of the property-exemplification theory which is compatible with realizer-functionalism.

In this chapter I introduce Neo-Davidsonian semantics as a general approach to the semantics of action sentences, and compare a simple Neo-Davidsonian treatment of negative action sentences to the Deflationist alternative sketched in Chapter 2. I then use this discussion to build a case on behalf of Deflationism, by showing that the simple Neo-Davidsonian treatment makes very bad predictions about the behaviour of adverbs, predictions which Deflationism avoids.

In “Bald Naturalism and McDowell’s Hylomorphism,” Rorty distinguishes between two views of the mind’s relation to the world. One view, which he calls “bald naturalism” and attributes to Donald Davidson, sees the mind as a network of intentional states profitable to attribute to certain complexly behaving objects to predict and control their interactions with the environment. The other view, which he dubs “naturalized Platonism” or “hylomorphism” and attributes to John McDowell, sees the mind as a device for getting the world right, where this process consists in the reproduction of the world in the mind. Rorty then uses the distinction to assess the force of McDowell’s criticisms of Davidson’s bald naturalism in Mind and the World. He argues, first, that those criticisms rely on attributing to Davidson a set of views only expressible in terms for which there is no place in his bald naturalism. Second, Rorty holds that those terms belong to McDowell’s hylomorphism and that this view needs to be abandoned, along with the intuitions it expresses. The paper makes this case by pointing to various counterintuitive consequences of McDowell’s view, such as its implication that the world has its own language.

In “Brandom’s Conversationalism: Davidson and Making It Explicit,” Rorty offers a clear and concise summary of the main argument of Brandom’s book its proximity to Davidson’s thought, and its particular limitations. Rorty takes the reader through a careful, point-by-point explication of where in their respective texts Brandom and Davidson endorse each other’s positions and where the apparent divergences in their attempts to naturalize semantics and philosophy of mind are not differences that make a difference. Rorty pays particular attention to where Brandom violates his claim that “there is no realm in which concepts do not apply” to endorse the existence of nonlinguistic facts.