The paper discusses the category of one of the most fundamental expressions of agency, those movements of agents that are actions. There have been three dominant views of action since the 1960s: 1. the Causal Theory of Action, 2. the Tryings/Willings view, and 3. Agent Causation. These views claim that actions are: 1. events of bodily movements which have the right causes; 2. specific types of mental events causing events of bodily movements; 3. instances of the causal relationship between agents (...) and events of bodily movements. Among other arguments, a specific interpretation of the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs has been taken by defenders of the Tryings/Willings views and Agent Causation to support their main claims. The paper argues that these three views mischaracterise actions of bodily movements. It argues for this by highlighting some implausible claims and problems of the three views; by offering an interpretation of the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs that does not lend support to these views; and finally, by providing an alternative view of actions. This view is the Pluralist View according to which agents’ movements are the activations of agents’ abilities to move. (shrink)

This paper considers and criticises what appears to be a suggestion by Hart and Honore in 'Causation in the Law' that there is a category of basic doings, which ought not themselves to be regarded as causings. It argues instead that all actions are causings by the agent.

According to the standard story of action, a story that can be traced back at least to David Hume , actions are those bodily movements that are caused and rationalized by a pair of mental states: a desire for some end, where ends can be thought of as ways the world could be, and a belief that something the agent can just do, namely, move her body in the way to be explained, has some suitable chance of making the world (...) the relevant way. Bodily movements that occur otherwise aren't actions, they are mere happenings. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on (...) general principles about the nature of knowledge rather than on intuitions about fringe cases, the recent responses that have been given to defuse the force of Davidson’s objection are silent against it. Moreover, the argument suggests that even weaker theses connecting practical entities with knowledge are also false. Recent defenders of the thesis that there is a necessary connection between knowledge and intentional action are motivated by the insight that this connection is non-accidental. I close with a positive proposal to account for the non-accidentality of this link without appeal to necessary connections by drawing an extended analogy between practical and perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to display an alternative to the familiar decompositional approach in action theory, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. On this Anscombean alternative, action is not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a productive (...) exercise of reason. I argue that to comprehend the proposed alternative requires an account of the temporality of events in general. An event does not simply have a position in time, but is itself temporally structured. With the inner temporality of events in view, the Anscombean conception of action as a specifically self-conscious form of temporal unity is made available for critical reflection. (shrink)

Two questions guide this article. First, according to Fischer and Ravizza (jointly and otherwise), what epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for performing an action A are not also requirements for freely performing A? Second, how much progress have they made on this front? The article's main moral is for philosophers who believe that there are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing that are not requirements for freely A-ing because they assume that Fischer (on his own or otherwise) (...) has shown that this is so. In showing that this assumption is false, I reopen an important question for these philosophers: How are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing related to requirements for freely A-ing? This is an interesting question in its own right, of course. (shrink)

Skilled activity, such as shaving or dancing, differs in important ways from many of the stock examples that are employed by action theorists. Some critics of the causal theory of action contend that such a view founders on the problem of skilled activity. This paper examines how a causal theory can be extended to the case of skilled activity and defends the account from its critics.

In various areas of Anglo-American law, legal liability turns on causation. In torts and contracts, we are each liable only for those harms we havecausedby the actions that breach our legal duties. Such doctrines explicitly make causation an element of liability. In criminal law, sometimes the causal element for liability is equally explicit, as when a statute makes punishable any act that has “caused… abuse to the child….” More often, the causal element in criminal liability is more implicit, as when (...) criminal statutes prohibitkillings, maimings, rapings, burnings, etc. Such causally complex action verbs are correctly applied only to defendants who have caused death, caused disfigurement, caused penetration, caused fire damage, etc. (shrink)

In this essay I critically examine Daniel Wegner’s account of conscious will as an illusion developed in his book The Illusion of Conscious Will. I show that there are unwarranted leaps in his argument, which considerably decrease the empirical plausibility and theoretical adequacy of his account. Moreover, some features essential to our experience of willing, which are related to our general understanding of free will, moral responsibility and human agency, are largely left out in Wegner’s account of conscious will. This (...) substantially diminishes its implications and significance for some profound philosophical issues. (shrink)

In this essay I critically examine Daniel Wegner’s account of conscious will as an illusion developed in his book The Illusion of Conscious Will (MIT Press, 2002). I show that there are unwarranted leaps in his argument, which considerably decrease the empirical plausibility and theoretical adequacy of his account. Moreover, some features essential to our experience of willing, which are related to our general understanding of free will, moral responsibility and human agency, are largely left out in Wegner’s account of (...) conscious will. This substantially diminishes its implications and significance for some profound philosophical issues. (shrink)

Recent research on proprioception reveals that it relies on a systematically distorted model of bodily dimensions. This generates a puzzle about proprioception in action control: action requires accurate bodily parameters. Proprioception is crucial for ordinary action, but if it relies on a systematically distorted body model, then proprioception should contain systematic errors. But we cannot respond by discarding proprioception from motor control, since we know from the severe problems deafferented agents face in acting that ordinary action requires proprioception. The solution (...) is that the possibility of bodily action is provided for by multimodal body representations for action. (shrink)

Is bodily awareness a condition on bodily action? I approach this question by weaving an argument based on considerations from action theory, the phenomenology of embodied agency, and from the psychology and neuroscience of action. In this paper, I discuss two accounts on which bodily awareness is a condition on bodily action. The first is an influential philosophical account from O'Shaughnessy, which claims that bodily awareness is necessary for the online control of bodily action. I argue that there are empirical (...) counterexamples to O'Shaughnessy's account. Instead I propose an account on which the capacity for bodily awareness is a condition on our capacity for ordinary bodily action. This alternative account does justice to the causal and functional character of ordinary bodily action as well as its phenomenology. It is also consistent with the psychology and neuroscience of action. I provide a two-stage argument for my view. The first stage shows that a sense of the spatial possibilities of one's body is a condition on intentionally acting with one's body. The second stage demonstrates that bodily awareness is a condition on a normal afferented agent's sense of the actions open to him through examining the role of bodily awareness in motor imagery and the role of motor imagery in preparatory processes for everyday actions. (shrink)

Abilities are in many ways central to what being an agent means, and they are appealed to in philosophical accounts of a great many different phenomena. It is often assumed that abilities are some kind of dispositional property, but it is rarely made explicit exactly which dispositional properties are our abilities. Two recent debates provide two different answers to that question: the new dispositionalism in the debate about free will, and virtue reliabilism in epistemology. This paper argues that both answers (...) fail as general accounts of abilities, and discusses the ramifications of this result. (shrink)

According to current orthodoxy in the philosophy of action, intentional actions consist in intrinsically mindless bodily movements that stand in causal relations to appropriate mental states. This paper challenges this approach to intentional action, by arguing that there are not enough appropriate mental states around to ‘animate’ all of the bodily movements we intuitively count as intentional actions. In the alternative picture I suggest, the bodily movements that constitute our intentional actions are themselves to be thought of as cognitive events, (...) embodying our grasp of ways of acting. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Embodiment is a fact of human existence which philosophers should not ignore. They may differ to a great extent in what they have to say about our bodies, but they have to take into account that for each of us our body has a special status, it is not merely one amongst the physical objects, but a physical object to which we have a unique relation. While Descartes approached the issue of embodiment through consideration of sensation and imagination, it is (...) more directly reached by consideration of action and agency: whenever we act upon the world, we act by moving our bodies. So if we can understand what an immaterialist such as Berkeley thinks about agency, we will have gone a fair way to understanding what he thinks about embodiment. §1 discusses a recent flurry of articles on the subject of Berkeley’s account of action. I choose to present Berkeley as a causal-volitional theorist not because I think it is the uniquely correct interpretation of the texts, but because I find it more philosophically interesting as a version of immaterialism. In particular, it raises the possibility of a substantive account of human embodiment which is completely unavailable to the occasionalist. §2 articulates an apparent philosophical problem for Berkeley qua causal-volitional theorist and show that Locke was aware of a related problem and had a solution of which Berkeley would have known. §3 distinguishes two interpretations of Berkeley’s famous denial of blind agency – as the assertion of a weak representational condition or a strong epistemic one – and provide evidence that there was a well-established debate about blind powers in the seventeenth century which took the metaphor of blindness as indicating an epistemic rather than merely representational failing. What remains to do in §4 is to consider whether Berkeley, with his own peculiar commitments, could in fact accept this account of agency. (shrink)

The paper offers the outlines of a response to the often-made suggestion that it is impossible to see how indeterminism could possibly provide us with anything that we might want in the way of freedom, anything that could really amount to control, as opposed merely to an openness in the flow of reality that would constitute the injection of chance, or randomness, into the unfolding of the processes which underlie our activity. It is suggested that the best first move for (...) the libertarian is to make a number of important concessions to the compatibilist. It should be conceded, in particular, that certain sorts of alternative possibilities are neither truly available to real, worldly agents nor required in order that those agents act freely; and it should be admitted also that it is the compatibilist who tends to give the most plausible sorts of analyses of many of the 'can' and 'could have' statements which seem to need to be assertible of those agents we regard as free. But these concessions do not bring compatibilism itself in their wake. The most promising version of libertarianism, it is argued, is based on the idea that agency itself (and not merely some special instances of it which we might designate with the honorific appellation 'free') is inconsistent with determinism. This version of libertarianism, it is claimed, can avoid the objection that indeterminism is as difficult to square with true agential control as determinism can sometimes seem to be. (shrink)

Intentions have been a central subject of research since contemporary philosophy of action emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. For almost that entire period, the approach has been to treat the study of intentions as separate from the study of morality. This essay offers a brief overview of that history and then suggests some ways forward, as exemplified by the essays collected in this volume.

Argues from the possibility of basic intentional action to a non-propositional theory of knowing how. The argument supports a broadly Anscombean conception of the will as a capacity for practical knowledge.

Argues that, in acting for a reason, one takes that reason to explain one's action, not to justify it: reasons for acting need not be seen "under the guise of the good". The argument turns on the need to explain the place of "practical knowledge" - knowing what one is doing - in intentional action. A revised and expanded version of this material appears in Part One of "Reasons without Rationalism" (Princeton, 2007).

Event-causal libertarians maintain that an agent’s settling of whether certain states-of-affairs obtain on a particular occasion can be reduced to the causing of events by certain mental events or states, such as certain desires, beliefs and/or intentions. Agent-causal libertarians disagree. A common critique against event-causal libertarian accounts is that the agent’s role of settling matters is left unfilled and the agent “disappears” from such accounts—a problem known as the disappearing agent problem. Recently, Franklin has argued that an “enriched” event-causal account (...) can overcome this problem. Franklin, however, doesn’t consider whether, as Pereboom argues, the agent as decider of “torn decisions” disappears from even enriched accounts. As I show here, Franklin’s enriched account takes some modifying if it is to overcome Pereboom’s torn decision problem—a special case of the disappearing agent problem. However, as I also show, there is a more fundamental problem facing event-causal libertarian accounts. It is implausible that an agent qua event or state simultaneously settles whether and how she intervenes. The upshot is that events and/or states lack an ability essential to completely fulfilling an agent’s role qua settler. This isn’t a problem for agent-causal accounts like the one offered by Steward because in as much as an agent qua substance settles whether her body moves in certain ways on certain occasions she simultaneously settles whether and how she intervenes. As a consequence, event-causal libertarians face a dilemma, or rather several, that agent-causal libertarians do not. This may ultimately be explained by the irreducibility of causation by agents to causation by events. (shrink)

In this paper, I intend to introduce what I think is a novel proposal in the metaphysics of action: one-particularism. In order to do so, I must first explain two ideas: a concept in the semantics of English that many philosophers of action take to be of great importance in action theory, causative alternation; and the idea of an intrinsic event. By attempting to understand the role that intrinsic events are meant to play in action theory, I then introduce my (...) proposal. Getting clear on what is an intrinsic event is a key, I think, to producing a viable theory of action, or, to be more precise, part of such a general theory, since it is limited to actions whose descriptions employ gerunds or perfect nominals formed from ergative verbs. I conclude by replying to two arguments that would be advanced against my proposal, both found in Alvin Goldman’s A Theory of Action. (shrink)

A prominent but poorly understood domain of human agency is mental action, i.e., thecapacity for reaching specific desirable mental statesthrough an appropriate monitoring of one's own mentalprocesses. The present paper aims to define mentalacts, and to defend their explanatory role againsttwo objections. One is Gilbert Ryle's contention thatpostulating mental acts leads to an infinite regress.The other is a different although related difficulty,here called the access puzzle: How can the mindalready know how to act in order to reach somepredefined result? A (...) crucial element in the solutionof these puzzles consists in making explicit thecontingency between mental acts and mentaloperations, parallel to the contingency betweenphysical acts and bodily movements. The paper finallydiscusses the kind of reflexivity at stake in mentalacts; it is shown that the capacity to refer tooneself is not a necessary condition of the successfulexecution of mental acts. (shrink)

The problem of the time of a killing is often cited as providing grounds for rejecting the action identification thesis favoured by Anscombe and Davidson. In this paper I make three claims. First, I claim that this problem is a threat to the action identification thesis because of two assumptions the thesis makes: since the thesis takes actions to be a kind of doings, it has to assume that agents’ doings last as long as their actions and vice versa. Second, (...) I claim that not making both of these assumptions necessarily leads to another problem, the problem of the acting dead. This means that any theory of action has to choose its poison and face either one of these unresolved problems. Third, I claim that the solution to the problem of the time of a killing can be found by heeding linguistic arguments that ‘kill’ cannot mean ‘cause to die,’ as is commonly assumed, but instead has to have a more complex meaning. I discuss an alternative, more complex proposal and show how it allows us to keep the action identification thesis, fits colloquial usage of ‘kill’ and deals with the problem of the time of a killing. (shrink)

It is typically assumed that actions are events, but there is a growing consensus that negative actions, like omissions and refrainments, are not events, but absences thereof. If so, then we must either deny the obvious, that we can exercise our agency by omitting and refrainment, or give up on event-based theories of agency. I trace the consensus to the assumption that negative action sentences are negative-existentials, and argue that this is false. The best analysis of negative action sentences treats (...) them as quantifying over omissions and refrainments, conceived of as events. (shrink)

A good surgeon knows how to perform a surgery; a good architect knows how to design a house. We value their know-how. We ordinarily look for it. What makes it so valuable? A natural response is that know-how is valuable because it explains success. A surgeon’s know-how explains their success at performing a surgery. And an architect’s know-how explains their success at designing houses that stand up. We value know-how because of its special explanatory link to success. But in virtue (...) of what is know-how explanatorily linked to success? This essay provides a novel argument for the thesis that know-how’s special link to success is to be explained at least in part in terms of its being, or involving, a doxastic attitude that is epistemically alike propositional knowledge. It is argued that the role played by know-how in explaining intentional success shows that the epistemic differences between know-how and knowledge, if any, are less than usually thought; and that "revisionary intellectualism", the view that know-how is true belief that might well fall short of knowledge, is not really a stable position. If its explanatory link to success is what makes know-how valuable, an upshot of my argument is that the value of know-how is due, to a considerable extent, to its being, or involving, a kind of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

The paper is a critical discussion of Sneddon’s recent proposal to revive ascriptivism in philosophy of action. Despite his declarations, Sneddon fails in his central task of giving an account of the distinction between actions and mre happenings. His failure is due to three major problems. First, the account is based on a misconceived methodology of “type” necessary and “token” sufficient conditions. Second, the “type” necessary condition he proposed is so weak that the connection that obtains between action and responsibility (...) also obtains between action and lack of responsibility. Third, neither the idea of responsibility nor the idea of defeating conditions is elucidated sufficiently to play any role in understanding what it is to be an action. (shrink)

After a long period of neglect, the phenomenology of action has recently regained its place in the agenda of philosophers and scientists alike. The recent explosion of interest in the topic highlights its complexity. The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework allowing for a more precise characterization of the many facets of the phenomenology of agency, of how they are related and of their possible sources. The key assumption guiding this attempt is that the processes through (...) which the phenomenology of action is generated and the processes involved in the specification and control of action are strongly interconnected. I argue in favor of a three-tiered dynamic model of intention, link it to an expanded version of the internal model theory of action control and specification, and use this theoretical framework to guide an analysis of the contents, possible sources and temporal course of complementary aspects of the phenomenology of action. (shrink)

G. E. M. Anscombe’s view that agents know what they are doing “without observation” has been met with skepticism and the charge of confusion and falsehood. Simultaneously, some commentators think that Anscombe has captured an important truth about the first-personal character of an agent’s awareness of her actions. This paper attempts an explanation and vindication of Anscombe’s view. The key to the vindication lies in focusing on the role of practical knowledge in an agent’s knowledge of her actions. Few commentators, (...) with the exception of Moran (2004) and Hursthouse (2000), have gotten the emphasis right. The key to a proper interpretation of Anscombe’s views is to explain her claims within the context of her teleological theory of action. The result is a theory ofintentional action that makes self-knowledge of one’s own actions the norm. (shrink)

When Booth moved his finger, thereby firing a gun, thereby killing Lincoln, did he perform three discrete actions, or were there relations of identity or inclusion among them? Most treatments of this problem have tended to assume there is but one sort of entity properly to be called an action, and hence that one answer to this question must be established to the exclusion of all others. And the favored answer has been that Booth's actions are not discrete, or indeed (...) even overlapping, but identical. It is possible, however, to adopt a more conciliatory spirit, in which a place is sought for talk of discrete or fine-grained actions in cases like this, as well as for entities of the coarser sort most have favored. (shrink)

How or in virtue of what does any one particular action differ from another? Available views on the issue of action individuation tend to emphasize the descriptive features of actions, such as where and when they occur, or what they cause or are caused by. I contend instead that actions are individuated by their normative features, such as what licenses them and what they license in turn. In this essay, deploying a suggestion from Sellars and Brandom, I argue specifically that (...) actions are individuated by their normative function or role. (shrink)

The notion of basic action has recently come under attack based on the idea that any putative basic action can always be divided into more basic sub-actions. In this paper it is argued that this criticism ignores a key aspect of the idea of basic action, namely, the ‘anything else’ part of the idea that basic actions are not done by doing anything else. This aspect is clarified, and it is argued that doing the sub-actions of which a putative basic (...) action consists does not amount to doing something different from doing that putative basic action. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether we can know how to do basic actions, from the perspective according to which knowing how to do something requires knowledge of a way to do it. A key argument from this perspective against basic know-how is examined and is found to be unsound, involving the false premise that there are no ways of doing basic actions. However, a new argument along similar lines is then developed, which contends that there are no ways of doing basic (...) actions in any sense that matters for acquiring knowledge-how. This requires coming to a deeper understanding of ways of doing things than has hitherto been sought, which should be useful for further theorizing in this area. It is concluded that analyses of knowing-how in terms of knowledge of ways are inconsistent with the common assumption that there is basic know-how. (shrink)

We present a modal logic called (logic of intention and attempt) in which we can reason about intention dynamics and intentional action execution. By exploiting the expressive power of , we provide a formal analysis of the relation between intention and action and highlight the pivotal role of attempt in action execution. Besides, we deal with the problems of instrumental reasoning and intention persistence.

Health and beauty are the most important physical ideals. This paper seeks to compare and contrast these ideals, based on a value theory of human abilities. Health is comprehended as a potential ability to act grounded in bodily functions. Beauty is explained as a symbolising reference to happiness, physical beauty as a combination of organic orientation to purpose and virtuous orientation to action. Physical beauty is the implicit symbolic expression of mental and physical health. This teleological theory is tested and (...) exemplified using current stereotypes such as youthfulness, slimness and shapeliness. (shrink)

It typically taken for granted that agents can be morally responsible for such things as, for example, the death of the victim and the capture of the murderer in the sense that one may be blameworthy or praiseworthy for such things. The primary task of a theory of moral responsibility, it is thought, is to specify the appropriate relationship one must stand to such things in order to be morally responsible for them. I argue that this common approach is problematic (...) because it attempts to explain the way in which an agent can be morally responsible for something that is external to her, the agent. Since, I argue, everything that matters for moral responsibility is internal to the agent, the accounts that emerge from this approach are committed to a particular form of moral luck. Instead, we should reject this form of moral luck, and with it, the possibility of moral responsibility for objects external to the agent. We are, I argue, morally responsible only for our inner willings. Thus, a form of internalism about moral responsibility is defended. (shrink)

It has been widely accepted since Stanley and Williamson (2001) that the only linguistically acceptable semantic treatments for sentences of the form ‘S knows how to V’ involve treating the wh-complement ‘how to V’ as an interrogative phrase, denoting a set of propositions. Recently a number of authors have suggested that the ‘how to V’ phrase denotes not a proposition, but an object. This view points toward a prima facie plausible non-propositional semantics for knowledge-how, which treats ‘how to V’ as (...) a free relative noun phrase. In this paper I argue that the free relative semantics is implausible. I show that linguistic phenomena which seem to support a free relative semantics can be explained by the supporter of an interrogative semantics, and demonstrate that standard linguistic tests strongly suggest that ‘how to V’ has an interrogative reading, and no free relative reading. (shrink)

An infuential twenty-first century philosophical project posits a central role for knowledge: knowledge is more fundamental than epistemic states like belief and justification. So-called “knowledge first” theorists find support for this thought in identifying central theoretical roles for knowledge. I argue that a similar methodology supports a privileged role for more specific category of basic knowledge. Some of the roles that knowledge first theorists have posited for knowledge generally are better suited for basic knowledge.

In this paper, I defend the view that a person performs an action A intentionally only if she intends to A against Michael Bratman’s alleged counterexample to it: the videogame case. I object that Bratman is mistaken in assuming that the consistency among an agent’s intentions is about the consistency among intended goals or objectives. Instead, I argue that the real reason why an agent’s intentions need to be consistent with each other is due to the necessity of the compatibility (...) of corresponding efforts of trying. But unfortunately for Bratman, this efforts-based consistency constraint – as a replacement of the objectives-based consistency constraint – cannot save the videogame case. (shrink)

A traditional view of perception and action makestwo assumptions: that the causal flow betweenperception and action is primarily linear or one-way,and that they are merely instrumentally related toeach other, so that each is a means to the other.Either or both of these assumptions can be rejected. Behaviorism rejects the instrumental but not theone-way aspect of the traditional view, thus leavingitself open to charges of verificationism. Ecologicalviews reject the one-way aspect but not theinstrumental aspect of the traditional view, so thatperception and (...) action are seen as instrumentallyinterdependent. It is argued here that a betteralternative is to reject both assumptions, resultingin a two-level interdependence view in whichperception and action co-depend on dynamicallycircular subpersonal relations and as a result may bemore than merely instrumentally interdependent. Thisis illustrated by reference to motor theories ofperception and control theories of action. (shrink)

Since 1969, when Dennett introduced a distinction between personal and sub- personal levels of explanation, many philosophers have used 'sub- personal ' very loosely, and Dennett himself has abandoned a view of the personal level as genuinely autonomous. I recommend a position in which Dennett's original distinction is crucial, by arguing that the phenomenon called mental causation is on view only at the properly personal level. If one retains the commit-' ments incurred by Dennett's early distinction, then one has a (...) satisfactory anti-physicalistic, anti-dualist philosophy of mind. It neither interferes with the projects of sub- personal psychology, nor encourages ; instrumentalism at the personal level. (shrink)

Contemporary literature in philosophy of action seems to be divided overthe place of action in the natural causal world. I think that a disagreementabout ontology underlies the division. I argue here that human action isproperly understood only by reference to a category of process or activity,where this is not a category of particulars.

This paper develops a taxonomy of kinds of actions that can be seen in group agency, human–machine interactions, and virtual realities. These kinds of actions are special in that they are not embodied in the ordinary sense. I begin by analysing the notion of embodiment into three separate assumptions that together comprise what I call the Embodiment View. Although this view may find support in paradigmatic cases of agency, I suggest that each of its assumptions can be relaxed. With each (...) assumption that is given up, a different kind of disembodied action becomes available. The taxonomy gives a systematic overview and suggests that disembodied actions have the same theoretical relevance as the actions of any ordinarily embodied human. (shrink)